BREAKING: Elon Musk Got Caught Posting As His Dad From His Mom’s Account, Which Is Probably The Saddest Thing You’ll Read All Week

A field guide to Elon Musk’s ever-expanding sock drawer of fake people he pretends to be on the internet at 3 a.m.

May 6, 2026

There are problems money can solve, and problems money cannot solve. Elon Musk, who has approximately all of the money, has spent the last decade dramatically expanding the second category. Loneliness, apparently, lives there. So does basic operational security. So does, on the evidence of the last 24 hours, the ability to remember which of your fake accounts is supposed to be your mother and which is supposed to be your father before you start typing.

It’s gotta be the ketamine…

Yesterday, May 5, the verified X account belonging to Maye Musk — model, author, and biological mother of one Elon R. Musk — quote-tweeted her son with the following bombshell about a woman she has, presumably, met:

“Your mom told me she was cleaning toilets in a Liverpool boarding house as a child. When I met her in 1966, she was sewing linings for a furrier in a small windowless room behind the store.”

Your mom. As in, Elon’s mom. As in, Maye Musk. As in, the person whose verified account is currently posting this tweet.

If you are confused, congratulations, your brain works. As one viewer summarized with admirable economy: “Elon’s mom caught posting from the perspective of Elon’s dad. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to assume Elon is posting on Twitter as both his parents & was on the wrong alt.”

Reader, the richest man in the history of the species appears to have been operating his estranged father’s voice, from his mother’s account, to corroborate his own tweet about his grandmother — and pulled the wrong puppet out of the drawer. He is, in essence, the world’s worst ventriloquist, and the dummy is his entire family.

The “Honest Mistake” Defense, Examined

Musk’s defenders rallied with the usual energy of people whose oxygen depends on this man not being humiliated. The official cope, currently making the rounds, is that Maye simply meant to type “grandmother” instead of “mom,” and we should all calm down. One particularly devoted explainer noted that Maye Musk was born in Canada and grew up in South Africa and “was never cleaning Liverpool toilets” — the toilet-cleaner in question was Elon’s paternal grandmother, Cora Robinson, who actually did grow up in Liverpool.

This is a wonderful defence if you do not think about it for more than four seconds. Yes — the geography only makes sense if the speaker is Errol Musk, Elon’s father, the man whose mother was Cora from Liverpool. The “typo” theory requires us to believe that 77-year-old Maye Musk, a published author with a memoir literally about her own life, accidentally referred to her ex-husband’s mother as her own daughter-in-law’s mother while replying to her son. The simpler theory requires us to believe Elon was logged into the wrong tab.

Occam’s razor, but the razor is also one of his alts.

A Brief Taxonomy of Elon’s Imaginary Friends

This is, frankly, not even Elon’s first time getting caught LARPing as a member of his own family on the website he owns. We are now deep enough into the saga that a field guide is warranted. Buckle up.

@ErmnMusk, a.k.a. “Elon Test” — The OG. Discovered in April 2023 when Musk shared a screenshot of his own profile and forgot to crop out the little account-switcher in the corner, which displayed a toddler holding a $300 chrome SpaceX Starship model. The account had previously tweeted “I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!” — which, coincidentally, is the birthday of his son X Æ A-12. So: a grown man, on his own social media platform, role-playing as his three-year-old son, complaining to strangers that he’s not old enough to go to nightclubs. Musk later confirmed the account in a 2024 deposition, describing it as a “test account” he had “briefly used.” Test for what, exactly, remains classified.

@babysmurf9000 — Discovered through a court transcript that referred to it as “baby smoke 9,000,” which I refuse to stop thinking about. Unlike the toddler-roleplaying ErmnMusk, this account posts in a style closely mirroring Musk’s main account — targeting the same critics, amplifying the same narratives, and followed by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Sample tweet from babysmurf9000, in response to Mark Cuban: “You are an idiot.” Another, replying to a BBC tweet: “BBC is dumber than a sack of bricks.” Truly the prose stylings of an emotionally regulated adult, and definitely not a billionaire crying into his phone at 4 a.m.

Adrian Dittmann — A whole separate beast. In late 2024, comedy account Liam Nissan helped popularize the theory that “Adrian Dittmann,” an account that compulsively praised Musk and Tesla, was Musk himself. Dittmann appeared in X Spaces audio chats with what listeners insisted was Musk’s voice run through a voice-changer. Shortly after pushing the theory, Liam Nissan’s 250,000-follower account vanished from the platform, and Nissan said on Bluesky that the person behind the Dittmann account had tried to dox him with creepy DMs containing personal information. Nothing says “no, I am definitely not Adrian” quite like making the guy who said you’re Adrian disappear within a week.

@mayemusk — Today’s exhibit. The facts speak, in this case quite literally, for themselves.

That’s at least four, and we haven’t even gotten to the speculative ones, like the suspicion floated for years that @cb_doge — better known as “DogeDesigner,” the screensaver-tier Elon stan whose entire feed is “BREAKING: Elon Musk just said something” — might also be in his orbit. The Manifold prediction market on whether DogeDesigner is an Elon alt is sitting at 6%, which feels generous in both directions. The point is that this is the discourse now. The richest man on Earth has so many fake accounts that there are betting markets on which sycophants are real.

Enter Ian Miles Cheong, Pilot Fish-In-Chief

Which brings us, with a kind of inevitability, to Ian Miles Cheong.

Cheong is a Malaysian commentator — based, depending on which biographical sketch you trust, in either Ipoh or the UAE — who has built a thriving little business as Elon’s most reliable amplifier. As Ben Sixsmith memorably put it, Cheong “is the social media equivalent of a pilot fish — obsessively praising and defending Musk. Musk, who has a chronic addiction to sycophancy, has reciprocated with supportive replies.”

The mechanics of the relationship are, by 2026, fairly well understood. Cheong is a master of the viral clip — he finds footage of a shoplifting incident in San Francisco or a controversial school board meeting in Virginia and posts it with a punchy caption tailor-made for Musk’s sensibilities. It’s a symbiotic relationship: Ian gets the massive reach boost from a Musk reply, and Musk gets a steady stream of content that fuels his “everything is collapsing” narrative. Cheong sifts the rage-bait, Elon amplifies the rage-bait, the algorithm rewards the rage-bait, ad revenue gets sliced into the pie, and Cheong gets a check. Cheong has reportedly posted six tweets in an hour during peak grind sessions; in the era of pay-per-engagement, that’s a fortune.

The Cheong-Musk axis is what the alt accounts service. They quote-tweet Cheong. They like Cheong’s posts. They reply “True.” or “Concerning.” or “🤔” to Cheong, which is technically content. Whether or not Cheong himself is “at the center” of an alt-account network in some operational sense — and there is no public evidence that he is running any of these accounts — he is unquestionably at the center of the ecosystem the alts are built to serve. The puppets need an audience that will dutifully reshare them. Cheong is that audience, professionally.

It is, in its own way, beautiful. A Malaysian content guy in either Ipoh or Dubai (jury’s out) helps prop up the engagement metrics of a half-dozen sock puppets operated by the man who owns the platform, who is also the richest person alive, who is also posting under his dead-mom-of-his-mom’s-ex-husband persona because he forgot which Chrome tab he was on.

The Sadness Of It All

Here is the part where, traditionally, a columnist softens. Here is where you’d say, “but really, you have to feel for him.” I have been trying to feel for him. I cannot quite get there.

Forget, for a moment, that this is the man currently restructuring federal agencies, advising presidents, and credibly threatening to colonize Mars. Strip all of that away. Just the human picture: a 54-year-old father of fourteen, worth roughly the GDP of Belgium, who has constructed an elaborate hall of mirrors on a website he personally bought for $44 billion in order to ensure that when he posts something dumb, a chorus of ghosts — his toddler son, a smurf, a man named Adrian, and now both of his parents — will rise up to tell him he is right and brave and correct.

He could buy any therapist on Earth. He could afford to simply log off. Instead he has chosen this: to be the loneliest man at the loudest party, where every guest is also him, wearing a mask of someone in his family.

As one viral tweet noted: “Getting caught posting from an alt account that’s supposed to be your own mother. I’d feel sad for his loneliness and neediness if he was literally anyone else on the planet.”

That’s it, really. That’s the line. There is a version of this story that is genuinely heartbreaking. It’s a story about a man whose children won’t speak to him, whose ex-wives have written publicly about how miserable he is, whose father is a famously difficult human being, and who has clearly never developed the internal scaffolding required to sit alone in a room with himself for ten minutes. That story would be sad.

But that man does not have a private army of accounts impersonating his three-year-old. That man does not have a Malaysian engagement-farmer on retainer to launder his obsessions. That man is not gutting public services and broadcasting eugenicist memes to 200 million followers between bouts of typing “your mom told me” from his actual mother’s verified profile.

The richest man in the world got caught playing both his parents in a one-man play about how cool he is, and he forgot which character he was. He is not a tragic figure. He is a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that won’t end, and we are all extras in it.

Mom, dad, smurf, toddler, Adrian — whoever’s in there tonight: log off. Go for a walk. The grandmother thing is fine. Nobody cared. But holy shit, Elon Musk might be the loneliest loser of all. JFC.

Filed under: things that would get you fired from a normal job in approximately eleven minutes.