X CEO Elon Musk confirmed in a deposition obtained by HuffPost that a burner account where he role-played as his toddler actually was his account.
“I briefly used this account as a test account,” Musk said in the deposition, referring to the account. “There are only two accounts that I use on a regular basis. One is my main account and the other is baby smoke [sic] 9,000.”
“Baby smoke” in the deposition is probably a mistating of @babysmurf9000, an account Musk confirmed was his in a gaming stream on X last October.
The @ermnmusk account, which was first unearthed by Vice and other posters, came to light after Musk tweeted a screenshot of himself logged into both his main account and the secondary account.
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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 24, 2023
Just tap on Monetization in settings. pic.twitter.com/CmD06Mczmn
According to HuffPost, court filings alleged that Musk deleted the account in February after the court ordered discovery against him.
The @ermnmusk account, whose profile picture was a young child similar in age to Musk’s child X Æ A-12, posted bizarre tweets in character as a child.
“I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun,” the account wrote in one post.
“I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!” he wrote in another. Musk’s child X’s birthday is also on May 4th.
Musk was deposed as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against him by a Jewish man he falsely accused of being a neo-Nazi involved in a confrontation with the far-right Proud Boys street gang in Portland in June.
Footage of the confrontations, where Proud Boys members unmasked and attacked the neo-Nazis, went viral on X. One bore a superficial resemblance to Brody, who was studying political science and had posted on Instagram about planning to work for the government after he graduated.
Musk picked up on that theory, which had been spread by some high-profile accounts, without evidence and claimed that it looked like the unmasked neo-Nazis were “a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation.”
Musk tagged @CommunityNotes in the post—X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system—something he pointed to as exculpatory under questioning in the deposition.
“I think I really did this in good faith, because I would not ask for a fact-check, which is what I do by adding Community Notes,” Musk said. “That’s asking for a fact-check on my own—on my own post.”
Brody is represented by Mark Bankston, who won $1.5 billion against Alex Jones in 2012 over lies Jones told about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
In Musk’s deposition, he accused Bankston of filing the suit for money (Brody asked for damages in excess of a million dollars), said that his questioning of the incident was an expression of free speech on the platform, and claimed that he wasn’t singling out anybody in particular with malice when he floated the theory about Brody.
“I mean, I’m on the platform a lot, so there are—I mean, I see sometimes several thousand posts per day,” Musk said.
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