It’s been a humiliating week in an already humiliating year for nepo-baby extraordinaire Elon Musk, and it’s just become worse for the South African emerald heir. Last night, while posting a screenshot of his regular account, the new Twitter owner and all-round loser accidentally revealed that he has an alternative account. The move of a big-brain, super genius, indeed.
The Tesla owner (but not the founder) posted the screenshot in an attempt to show content creators how to enable subscriptions on his newly acquired website — so, for once, he was actually doing something useful. Although Musk has not yet confirmed that the account is his, all the evidence strongly suggests that he has control of it. And, given that it was his screenshot that revealed the account’s existence to us, the image is unlikely to be doctored to make him look bad. The tweets that this burner account has produced, however, very much do make him look even more deranged than previously thought, which is no mean feat, considering some of the stuff that’s come out about him in the past.
Aside from pathetically and constantly replying to his own tweets, some of the posts are just outright troubling, like his response to a tweet that mentioned Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto: “Do you like Japanese girls?” Many of the worst offending tweets have been deleted since the news broke, but thankfully, the internet never forgets (and users are pretty quick to screenshot things).
The image and persona he’s chosen for this account is bizarre too. The handle is @ErmnMusk, the username is “Elon Test,” and the troubled Twitter owner appears to be imitating a child. The account’s profile picture is also one of a young boy. Given Musk’s associations with known child traffickers, and his accusations that people who disagree with him are child sexual predators, this information is, well, strange to say the least.
In a change of pace for the hotbed of white supremacy that is 4chan, it was users on the site that appeared to first find the alt account. When you reverse image search the profile picture using both TinEye and Yandex, the image Musk chose for his child persona profile doesn’t have any matches, which implies it’s not been seen anywhere else online — adding to the creep factor.
Delving into the account’s posts, there’s plenty more cringe to be had. It was first created just weeks after Musk purchased the social media giant, and its first like was on a “real” Musk tweet about Twitter’s bot problem. @ErmnMusk has also replied to several non-Elon tweets, although most seem to be related to the South African, including one reply of “Wow!” to a CNBC tweet about Tesla’s self-driving cars. Totally normal behavior, then.
While this could just be a terrible joke, some tweets from the account point to a more depressing view: that Musk misses one of his many, many, many kids. Just before it was discovered to be Elon’s alt, the account tweeted about turning three on May 4th, which is the birthday of Musk and Grimes’ child with the incredibly stupid name. The account has also tweeted about wishing to be old enough to go to nightclubs. In one of the saddest tweets (now deleted), @ErmnMusk posted about how Grimes’ kids must “hate her” for leaving “the King of Space X.”
In a hilariously ironic twist, the college student who once tracked Musk’s private jet usage using publicly available information (before Musk got the account banned) was one of the first to tweet about the Space X owner’s alternative account. The lesson here seems to be that even if you’re a billionaire, you can run, but you can’t hide online.
Among all the jokes and memes this news has generated, the implications of the owner of Twitter using an alt-account that pretends to be his two-year-old child and replies to (and with) inappropriate content is yet to really be considered (what a sentence that is). Elon has long been known to be vindictive and childish, but this is beyond even his usual disconcerting antics. For now, though, I guess we can all just continue to laugh at the man who’s very publicly becoming unraveled, all because people wouldn’t stop making fun of him online.