Elon Musk tweeted a photo Monday night showing him logged into his Twitter account, announcing to content creators how they can turn on the monetization features on Twitter. Unfortunately for Musk, people weren’t paying much attention to the fact that he has 24,700 paid subscribers; instead, some users noticed that he appeared to be logged into another account. And upon further investigation, it appeared the account belonged to @ErmnMusk, a now-deleted account under the display name “Elon Test,” which used a photo of Musk’s three-year-old son as his avatar.
Is this really Elon Musk’s prepaid account? We’re hesitant to make that statement definitively (and if we tried to ask for a comment from Twitter or from Musk himself, we’d just get a poop emoji in response). But there is evidence that makes this theory seem more plausible than not.
Many of the tweets on this would-be-delete account were pretty mundane, including tweets about having no followers (last we saw before the account was taken down, it had since been followed by over 27,000 people. Wow). But some posts get a little awkward.
When Bitcoin promoter Michael Saylor tweeted about Satoshi, the pseudonymous figure who developed Bitcoin, @ErmnMusk responded, “Do you like Japanese girls?”
In another tweet, @ErmnMusk responded to a post mocking former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who dated FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. She pleaded guilty to billions of dollars in wire fraud amid the FTX collapse, prompting a user to mock Ellison’s appearance while she crudely implied that Bankman-Fried risked his billionaire status for sex. @ErmnMusk replied: “I 💜 librarians.”
In other tweets, @ErmnMusk appeared to be pretending to be X, Musk’s two-year-old son, X Æ A-XII, whom he calls X.
During the FTX collapse, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky tweeted: “Feels like we’re in a nightclub and the lights come on.” @ErmnMusk responded: “I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound very fun. In another tweet, @ErmnMusk posted: “I’m finally turning 3 on May 4th!” which is consistent with X’s actual birth date.
Could Musk just be trolling everyone? Sure. But beyond the fact that these tweets echo Musk’s general online behavior, there is more evidence that this could be Musk’s prepaid account. The account was created shortly after Musk bought Twitter, and according to VICE reports, the image of X… uploaded on November 29, 2022: It doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere else online before this (within a few hours, it’s proliferated on Twitter, where many users impersonate the now-deleted account). Programmer Travis Brown pulled 99 “profile snapshots” of the account, which show that he has used the name “Elon Test” for most of his existence, except when he used the name “Star Sapphire”.
So how bad is it that Musk possibly leaked his own disposable account? Hey, we’ve all been there! Sometimes you just accidentally leak your Burner account, where you alternate between role-playing as a little kid and nasty comments about women.
