There’s zero concrete evidence that the @AdrianDittmann account on X, formerly Twitter, is controlled by site owner Elon Musk. But since 2023, many users have convinced themselves that the billionaire is masquerading as this now-prominent influencer, using a pseudonymous identity to sing his own praises. The conspiracy theories have only intensified in recent weeks.
Active on the site since 2021, Adrian Dittmann, who has identified himself as a German man in his twenties living somewhere in Oceania, is in most ways indistinguishable from any other Musk sycophant on X. For Musk’s 53rd birthday last summer, he posted a video reel of the tech CEO’s “greatest achievements.” He complained when Musk was left off of Time‘s list of 100 most influential people in AI. And he champions every launch by SpaceX, as well as the dubious promise of Tesla‘s “Full Self-Driving” technology.
Back in August 2023, however, Dittmann found himself promoted from low-level reply guy to Musk’s online social circle when the two chatted during an X Spaces event. Listeners, including Musk himself, were incredibly amused at the similarity in their voices, right down to accent, cadence, and techno-babble vocabulary. Dittmann swore that he was neither doing an impression nor manipulating his natural speaking voice with AI. “That’s the best part,” he said. “This is what I unironically sound like, all the time.”
From that point on, many X users, and Musk critics in particular, searched for a smoking gun that would prove “Dittmann” was nothing more than Musk’s burner account — a hype man of his own invention, not unlike “John Barron,” a publicist character that Donald Trump famously concocted to promote himself in his New York real estate career. All of it has been circumstantial evidence, from Dittmann supposedly slipping up and saying “I” when he meant to refer to Musk to Dittmann’s fawning praise over a picture of Musk with his son, X Æ A-Xii, shared on X a year ago: “You’re an amazing father, Elon,” Dittmann wrote. “Your kids are very lucky to have you.”
And last March, the musician Grimes — Musk’s on-and-off partner and mother of three of his children, with whom he is presently engaged in a custody battle — revealed on Instagram that she was dating DJ Matteo Milleri, better known as Anyma. Shortly afterward, Dittmann posted on X, “Love lost is a pain unlike any other.”
Again, none of this is remotely conclusive, and it’s important to note that Dittmann’s clout has grown along with the accusations that he is Musk, earning him an audience of some 200,000 and tens of thousands of listeners for a daily Spaces talk he calls “The Conversation.” Both he and Musk continue to deny that they’re the same person, though often coyly or through trollish memes that invite further speculation. It would make perfect sense if Dittmann were tailoring his digital persona to support the burner theory — thereby reaping some of the outsize attention Musk commands — while Musk enjoyed sowing further confusion (along with Dittmann’s flattering commentary). On the other hand, Musk did admit in a deposition last year that has used multiple sock-puppet accounts, including a profile on which he wrote from the perspective of his toddler son X Æ A-Xii.
Yet while some believe that Dittmann is Musk playing amateurish mind games on his platform, the hard data tells a slightly different story. Misinformation researcher E. Rosalie Li, in a recent analysis for the Information Epidemiology Lab, identified several factors that could be used to make the case that Dittmann is not Musk. Dittmann posts from the Android app, while Musk never has; Dittmann’s posting volume has remained flat over time, and Musk’s has steadily risen since he acquired the site. Moreover, their activity during a 24-hour cycle does not match: Musk’s activity, Li notes, “never wholly drops to zero,” a reflection of his probably irregular sleep cycle. He is, in fact, highly active at an hour in the day when Dittmann tends to fall quiet and is presumably asleep or otherwise occupied. (The contrary reading would no doubt hold that Musk can’t roleplay as Dittmann when he is too busy posting as himself.)
“If this were any other case, considering the account data, I would say this involves two individuals,” Li concludes. “Still, given the number of potential variables and Musk’s extreme outlier status, I remain undecided and open to new information. I would be more surprised if it turned out to be Musk, given the amount of time the [Adrian Dittmann] account spends in Twitter Spaces, but that’s me making assumptions about how busy the CEO of multiple companies might be.”
Meanwhile, Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes digital forensics and has written about AI voice clones, conducted a biometric comparison of audio clips from Musk and Dittmann, sharing the results on his LinkedIn profile. He found that their voices offered a closer match than the average similarity of any two distinct voices in a dataset of 500, and wrote that while “it is difficult to draw strong conclusions across a larger population,” only some 0.5 percent of people “have a voice doppelgänger as similar as Musk and Dittmann.” That is, he went on, “these two voices are unusually similar, and while it is improbable that they are different people, it is not impossible.” Of course, this leaves open the question of voice modulation through AI technology or other means.
For all Dittmann’s mild protesting about not being Musk, he has remained in strict ideological alignment with his idol as tensions flare during President-elect Donald Trump‘s transition back into the White House. When Musk and his allies in Silicon Valley, who donated hundreds of millions to help elect Trump in November, said that tech firms need to hire skilled foreign workers through the H-1B visa system, it ignited an uproar among the MAGA base stoked by Trump’s incessant demonization of all immigrants. Dittmann was among those who took up Musk’s position, fighting hardliners on the issue — including white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer — in Spaces events. One of those calls saw right-wing troll Charles Johnson outright accuse Dittmann of being Musk. “You know how retarded you’re going to sound when, like, one day, who I am is going to come to the surface?” Dittmann asked during the exchange, at which point Johnson said he knew he was talking to Musk. “This guy is so fucking stupid,” Dittmann replied.
More recently, a series of screenshots from a 4Chan thread became part of the lore. On Wednesday, an individual who claimed to be Dittmann and used a “tripcode,” a string of characters meant to identify a specific user (the pseudonymous “Q” whose posts formed the basis of the QAnon movement did the same), tried to make the case for H-1B visas while defending Musk and X policies on the forum. In the thread, this person made some embarrassing mistakes (writing “HIPPA” instead of “HIPAA” for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and claims (including that “Elon is a father who gets lots of sex”). This individual also shared a screenshot of the X interface that appeared to show they had administrator privileges on the site, leading to another round of viral allegations that Musk had outed himself as @AdrianDittmann. The swift deletion of these posts seemed to further indicate someone covering their tracks.
However, a source at X subsequently told The Verge that the screenshot was almost certainly a fake, as employee account dashboards aren’t configured that way. In that case, it might be considered another piece of misdirection intended to keep the Musk/Dittmann saga going, perhaps to Dittmann’s benefit. He has, in the past, praised X’s creator revenue sharing program for users like himself, with payouts determined by engagement from other premium accounts — and Li’s research show his account activity spikes whenever he is “unmasked” as Musk.
On Friday, YouTuber and Twitch star ConnorEatsPants hosted Dittmann on his channel, where the two played Fortnite. The streamer peppered Dittmann with a number of questions related to Musk, referring to Grimes and the New Year’s Day Las Vegas bombing in which the suspect blew up a Tesla Cybertruck. He also questioned how Musk has the time to tweet so much (Dittmann’s answer: “Autism“) and tangled with Dittmann over whether The Matrix is a “trans allegory” (Musk has a history of transphobia). He also rankled Dittmann by challenging him to “name three women” — Dittmann refused — and proposing that Musk is “just a rich guy” who could feasibly spend hours gaming because other people run his companies for him. The awkward interview persuaded many viewers that ConnorEatsPants was chatting with Musk himself. “THATS SO OBVIOUSLY HIM LMFAOOO,” read one reply on X.
Yet the following day brought a thorough digital investigation from The Spectator, analyzing Dittmann’s “posts, social media, deleted content, AI art, comments on Spaces and unique biographical details.” Their forensic evidence strongly suggests that Dittmann is not Musk but… a man named Adrian Dittmann. The real Dittmann, the publication concluded, “is the son of a German software entrepreneur who has launched several businesses in Fiji, including a forestry venture, a bottled water company and a marina and yachting facility.” One of those companies had entered the Musk Foundation’s $100 million Xprize Carbon Removal contest the same month Dittmann had joined X (then Twitter) and Dittmann had revealed as much during an April 2023 Spaces event. Facebook photos of Dittmann and his partner were removed after The Spectator emailed him for comment. But the real-life Dittmann can still be seen in a white polo shirt with black trim, black-framed glasses, and a blond goatee in a video from last year of the grand opening ceremony for his family’s maritime retail center at the Port Denarau Marina in Fiji.
Despite this revelation, some are sure to insist that it doesn’t explain everything about the Dittmann affair. Musk’s haters delight in the notion of him posing as a cringeworthy superfan for his own validation and self-esteem, even if it does strain credulity to think that a man already so prolific and omnipresent on social media under his own name has the extra bandwidth to talk for hours on Spaces every night as his alter ego. It certainly appears, though, that Dittmann was the most expected operator of all: someone looking to curry favor with the richest man on the planet.
Update Jan. 4, 2:52pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect new reporting on Adrian Dittmann’s identity from The Spectator.