X owner Elon Musk is facing renewed allegations that he is also the person behind Elon Musk-adoring fan Adrian Dittman. The claim came to prominence after screenshots posted by Dittman to 4chan (because of course it was 4chan) seemingly revealed that he has access to administrator privileges on X, although the authenticity of the image has been disputed by a source within X.

The image was posted by Dittman as part of a rambling defense of Musk's stewardship of X, his ability to appropriately self-medicate, and perhaps most famously, that “Elon is a father who gets lots of sex.” The messages have since been deleted but are preserved for posterity (and, I must say, irony) in various posts on X. 

(There's also a 4chan archive if you want to go deep on the whole thing, but do note that it's awash in racism, homophobia, and transphobia—it's 4chan, after all—and adjust your expectations accordingly.)

What really got attention, though, is a shot of the X interface posted by Dittman that seemingly revealed he has access to admin privileges on the platform. The image of his interface includes links to account switching, the admin portal, and bans—options not available to regular X users. 

That in itself is very odd indeed, but it carries extra weight because it comes on top of earlier allegations that Musk and Dittman are one and the same: A July 2023 report by The Independent, for instance, said that Dittman's “voice and laugh sounds remarkably similar to Mr Musk's,” a point others on X have noted independently. Dittman has also apparently referred to Musk in the first person on at least one occasion, and Musk's own daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, (via The Verge) also seems to believe that they're the same person.

Still, the image posted to 4chan isn't conclusive evidence by itself. A source at X told The Verge that the actual interface used by X employees doesn't look like the one seen in the image, implying that it was faked in order to encourage the rumor about Dittman being a sockpuppet account. It's not even certain that Dittman, whoever he is, posted it: 4chan users can use pretty much whatever name they want when starting new threads, so this could all simply be a bored third party looking to crank people up for fun.

But on the other other hand, Musk has done exactly this sort of thing before. In a 2024 lawsuit deposition reported by the Huffington Post, Musk copped to using sockpuppet accounts, including one in which he pretended to be a three-year-old child—although he said that account was only used “for testing.”

Is Musk Dittman? Is Dittman Musk? What makes all of this so exhaustingly stupid is that it's impossible to say. In a sane world, claims that the wealthiest man on the planet is using a long-term sockpuppet to prop himself up with ego-boosters that sound like they're written by a pre-teen would be dismissed out of hand as unmitigated nonsense probably being shared by those same delinquent pre-teens. But we don't have that luxury in our world. We have speculation, anonymous denials, and—worst of all—the actual possibility that, yeah, Musk is Dittman.

It's impossible to prove a negative and so there's a good likelihood that this madness will drag on for a long time to come, unless Musk either biffs it so badly that denial isn't possible, or he's forced to reveal the truth in another lawsuit deposition. For now, we can at least take some small comfort in the one thing in the online world that never lets us down: memes.