Twitter thought Elon Musk’s bizarre tweets were evidence he’d been hacked

Elon Musk has been behaving a little bizarrely of late.

When he’s not accusing Thai cave rescuers of being paedophiles, or getting high on podcasts while Tesla’s stock goes down, he’s stepping down as Telsa’s chairman and paying a $20 million fine to the SEC over an ill-advised tweet.

But still, it’s perhaps not that surprising that someone at Twitter thought Musk’s account had been compromised when he started posting some bizarre tweets earlier this week.

That last tweet from Elon Musk was particularly asking for trouble, as there have been many many reports of scammers pushing Bitcoin scams on Twitter while pretending to be the Tesla founder.

Sure enough, Twitter locked Elon Musk out of his account, a fact which appeared to delight the entrepreneur:

“Twitter thought I got hacked & locked my account haha”

It’s an odd state of affairs when the bogus Elon Musk accounts offering bitcoin giveaways appear more legitimate than the real Elon’s tweets.

For further discussion of this, and other stories from the world of security and online privacy, be sure to check out the “Smashing Security” podcast:

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.