While the rest of the internet was speculating wildly about an X user named Adrian Dittmann actually being Elon Musk, investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet was doing the real work. She tracked down Dittmann, a German living in Fiji, and published the story in The Spectator. Now X is blocking anyone from sharing her story and suspended her account for 30 days.
Over the last two weeks, the Dittmann question has consumed the tech press. The short version is that there’s a guy on X who loves to defend Elon Musk and who sounds a lot like him.
Not so, says Sweet. “The real-life Dittmann 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,” she says in her Spectator investigation. “One of those companies entered the Musk Foundation’s $100 million Xprize Carbon Removal contest the same month the Dittmann X account was created, in July 2021.”
You can’t share her story on X. When you try, the site returns an error. “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful,” it says.
If you haven’t been following the Dittmann-Musk saga, then good for you. You made healthy choices as 2024 rolled into 2025. Here’s what you missed: Over the holiday, Musk kicked up a firestorm among the MAGA faithful with a full-throated support of H1B visas and highly skilled immigrant labor. In Spaces across X during the controversy, both Dittmann and Musk appeared to defend visas and call various members of the GOP stalwart racists.
As Dittmann prattled on about how amazing Musk was, people noticed something strange. Dittmann sounded like Musk. Not a little bit, but a lot. The Dittmann account appeared on X in 2021 and has, over the course of its time on the site, rushed to defend Musk’s honor on more than one occasion. The first time people noticed the similarities between them was in 2023 when they both appeared in a space together.
This 2023 conversation was a key part of Sweet’s investigation. The two sound similar and Dittmann explained his accent during the July 2023 X space. “I grew up in Gibraltar, lived in Morocco for a few years,” he said. He also said, “I can tell you I’m in Oceania.” According to Sweet, these details fit the Fiji-based Dittmann she tracked down.
The similarities between Dittmann and Musk’s accents were at the center of a lot of claims that the pair were the same person.
On Linkedin, UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid claimed he’d analyzed the voices of Dittmann and Musk and found them so similar that they were probably the same person. “I performed this analysis by comparing each of 500 distinct voices in a dataset we created to the closest match in the same dataset,” Farid said in his post. “With only 500 people in our dataset, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions across a larger population, but based on this analysis, I can say that only about 0.5% of people have a voice doppelgänger as similar as Musk and Dittman. In other words, these two voices are unusually similar, and while it is improbable that they are different people, it is not impossible.”
Sweet pointed out on X that the accents and writing styles are different. “Not only is Adrian Dittman’s accent different from Elon Musk’s accent, they write completely differently. Here’s Dittman writing allot for a lot, one of many things he does in writing that Elon does not do,” she said on X.
Not only is Adrian Dittman’s accent different from Elon Musk’s accent, they write completely differently. Here’s Dittman writing allot for a lot, one of many things he does in writing that Elon does not do.
Embarrassing how many news outlets are running w/ the theory that it’s… https://t.co/JrmlyRYjMI pic.twitter.com/3OOu27DSRc
— Jacqueline Sweet (@JSweetLI) December 31, 2024
The story got weirder last week when someone calling themselves Dittmann jumped onto 4chan to defend Musk. The toxic-brained posters of the /pol/ board started up a conversation about the exploding Cybertruck and an account that labeled itself as Dittmann dove in to defend Musk. During its posts, the Dittmann account revealed something: it had X admin access. That’s a weird thing to have for a random blue check.
While attempting to explain moderation and sensitive content warnings to the frothing racist cesspit that is 4chan’s /pol/ board, Dittmann shared a screenshot from his X account. In the bottom right-hand corner, under the trending board, are two buttons most users don’t have. “Admin portal” and “bans.” Access to high-end X admin tools adds fuel to the fire that Dittmann is just Musk posting a defense of himself online.
It’s impossible to tell if the person posting on 4chan is actually the person in charge of the Dittmann account. It’s also impossible to know if the screenshot they posted is legitimate. An anonymous source within X told The Verge that the screenshot is fabricated and doesn’t reflect what a real admin panel looks like. Faking a screenshot leads to more questions, which makes this story all the more exhausting.
Musk has also been caught using alt accounts before. In 2023, Musk posted a screenshot of an X account that showed one of his burner accounts. Journalists tracked down the account which used an avatar of Musk’s son and, like Dittmann, would often rush to the defense of Musk. That alt has since been suspended.
Sweet’s investigation in The Spectator lays out the most coherent and probable explanation for what’s going on: Dittmann is just a Musk super fan with a voice that sounds shockingly similar to his hero. Musk is a weirdo and we wanted to believe that faking a whole other person is something he would do. Musk was only too happy to play along.
“I am Adrian Dittmann. It’s time the world knew,” he said in a reply to Sweet posting her Spectator story on X. The initial post he replied to has since been removed because it “violated the X Rules.”
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2025-01-06 15:50:32
