I Am Once Again Begging the Left Not to Get Baited Into Conspiracy Thinking

Among the increasingly unhinged (decreasingly hinged?) antics of our friend Elon Musk lately, one recent debacle stood out from the rest: The curious and absurd case of Adrian Dittmann.

 For those with the good sense to have no idea what I’m talking about, for months the surprisingly robust community of people who hate Elon Musk have been obsessed with the idea that one of his superfans on Twitter, a guy who goes by the handle Adrian Dittmann, is actually Musk himself writing under a pseudonym.

 Dittmann is a prolific podcaster on Twitter’s “spaces” feature and practically every day, for a good chunk of the day, co-hosts these spaces with a bunch of other notorious people who don’t have jobs because their entire income is farming Twitter’s pay-per-view monetization system. People like Ian Miles Cheong and a bunch of guys with frog avatars. Basically, these guys just shitpost rage bait all day long—they have to, because if they don’t piss enough people off on a particular week they can’t pay the rent.

 Dittmann’s daily space is like the coffee lounge for these insufferable assholes. And what got people really suspicious is that Dittmann sounds a hell of a lot like Elon Musk.

 It does legitimately give you pause to hear it. The same deep register, the same odd, not-quite-American accent, and of course, a set of beliefs and talking points that are one hundred percent in lockstep with the world’s most famous man-baby.

 What began as a pretty fanciful idea started to really gain momentum when Dittmann started calling into Alex Jones’ Infowars show, and Jones became convinced that he was talking to Musk—despite Dittmann’s insistence to the contrary.

People have been picking up and dropping this thing for a while—it first started getting media attention a full year ago—but for whatever reason it really kicked up recently, enough that prominent leftist personalities started coming around to the idea that this guy is Elon Musk doing some kind of crazy bit.

It was really only a matter of time before things came to enough of a head for someone to do some serious investigative journalism, which in the modern world basically means crossmatching someone’s poorly-secured digital footprint against publicly accessible information. And despite the conspiracy theory having reached a point where people were trying to decode the meaning of the pseudonym syllable by syllable, Da Vinci Code style…

 …a group of journalists ultimately bylined to Jacqueline Sweet at The Spectator unveiled that the individual at the heart of the mystery is not Elon Musk, but is in fact someone named… Adrian Dittmann.

 Unsatisfied by both the lack of credit and the shitty editorial hack job on their piece by the publisher (you’d expect nothing less from the Speccy) the full slate of researchers independently released their more comprehensive findings on an independent blog.

 And the liberal and leftist anti-Musk community were pissed the fuck off.

 Not at Musk or Dittmann, you understand. They’re pissed off at the journalists who exposed them as two different men.

 If you go to any internet hive of really passionate Musk haters, like the EnoughMuskSpam subreddit, or certain pockets of Bluesky or Discord, and openly suggest even now that Musk and Dittmann are two different people, they will tear you to shreds. They’ll treat you like you just strolled into a MAGA rally and casually said the 2020 election was legitimate. They’ll tell you that the exposé is actually a psyop and they might even accuse you of being part of it.

This seems downright bizarre when you consider that the methods used to expose Dittmann’s identity are practically identical to those used to reveal the identity of the neo-Nazi cartoonist Stonetoss, an investigation that was celebrated for weeks by the left and Musk’s efforts to cover it up were condemned. Now, in the case of Dittman, the same methods used for the same motives are slammed by the same people as dubious, inconclusive, and illegitimate.

 To understand why, you need to understand just how invested people had become in Adrian Dittmann being Elon Musk. As with most conspiracy thinking, it has less to do with what the evidence actually shows and more to do with what the preferential reality would be. In this case it’s vastly preferential for the Musk/Dittmann thing to be some kind of idiotic sock puppet game because of what that would say about him if that were true, and also to be considered is the amount of inertia and investment that everyone has already put into believing it.

 I never seriously thought that Dittmann was Musk but I’m not about to talk down to anyone who did. I’m not going to talk shit to Ed Zitron and I doubt I ever will. This isn’t on the level of QAnon being the codename of a secretly living JFK Jr, it’s not Flat Earth stuff. Dittmann really, really sounds like Elon Musk.

 But then … does he really?

 For those who held out the longest, myself included, the primary objection was that Elon Musk is a really fucking terrible speaker. He’s a mush-mouthed stammering mess at the best of times who always sounds like the slow and incredibly awkward kid you were forced to sit next to in school for an assigned project and he won’t shut up about his rare Pokemons. You get the impression that he hates talking to people more than just about anything.

 Adrian Dittmann, on the other hand, is fluent, confident, speaks rapidly, and loves talking to people so much that he’ll tolerate being on call with Ian Miles Cheong for six hours a day.

I’ve heard all the answers to this—maybe he’s just more confident in anonymity. Maybe he’s more fluent in a casual space than in an interview. Dittmann’s nearly three hour long Twitch-streamed Fortnite session with apparent celebrity ConnorEatsPants was the smoking gun for a lot of people who think the resemblance to an off-the-cuff-Musk is such that to deny it is to deny the evidence of your own ears.

 The voice analysis approach to proving Dittmann is Musk has gone so far as to invoke the expertise of a Berkeley professor specialising in biometric voice identification, who thinks “while it is improbable that they are different people, it is not impossible.”

 I admit there’s a lot to be convinced by here, and there are times during the Fortnite stream when I wondered if there really is something going on here even in spite of the Spectator article.

There is nothing wrong with suspecting that there is something really fishy happening here. People are not hallucinating the similarities between the voices. The mistake that the voice analysis theorists are making is that they are hanging their entire theory on it.

 Musk and Dittmann being the same person is still the extraordinary claim being made here. It is this claim that holds the burden of proof. You can attack and refine the voice thing as much as you like, all year long, analyse register and accent and linguistic patterns, even get a Berkeley voice professor on your side, but what you’re doing is still just the equivalent of someone focusing all their energy and attention on one really weird and difficult to explain detail in the moon landing footage and forcing every other piece of evidence to conform to that.

 For instance, I find it really astonishing that nobody has ever really investigated whether it is, you know, actually physically possible. Like, do we have any clear evidence of Dittmann and Musk being in two separate places at the same time?

Once you start looking into that, you’ll find quite a lot of stuff that very quickly makes the Musk-is-Dittmann thing very difficult to explain. For instance, the notorious ConnorEatsPants livestream, which many people see as the absolute smoking gun, took place the same day as a major SpaceX Falcon 9 launch.

 We don’t have live footage of what Elon Musk was specifically doing that day, it’s true, but these rockets are the only thing in life besides black crime statistics that he genuinely cares about, and we’re expected to believe that what he was doing that day was playing Fortnite with a D-list Twitch streamer.

 Two very important facts to consider here: One, Elon Musk is one of the most public figures in the entire world. There is famously a private jet tracker that follows his movements from day to day. Since joining the Trump administration his movements are even more closely scrutinised. Two: Adrian Dittmann runs a Twitter space almost every single day, for hours at a time, sometimes long into the night.

 I’ve tuned into some of these spaces on occasion in my curiosity about this whole thing, and though they are generally very Ian Miles Cheong heavy they usually also feature a lot of Dittmann. If you keep an eye on his jet tracker at the same time then you’re invited to believe some pretty unlikely scenarios, such as that he conducts an unbroken casual livestream into his (phone? laptop?) while actively disembarking from a plane and walking across a tarmac.

 And look, I know Musk doesn’t work as hard as he pretends. I’ve made the observation myself. But let’s not pretend he does nothing. At the very least he is obsessed with control to the point of fanaticism. His wealth and his power simply make that control easy for him. Everybody who answers to him lives in Elon Musk’s panopticon, so is it really possible that a full quarter of his working life is spent pseudonymously shooting the shit with Ian Miles Cheong and nobody notices and there are no side effects from that sudden and total dereliction of what had up to now been an iron fisted dictatorship over six companies and onboarding a government department?

These are the investigations you need to make, not obsessing constantly over the minutiae of whether that vowel pronunciation is present in a South African accent. I haven’t done these investigations myself but I eagerly invite anyone who’s invested in this to do it themselves! Is Dittmann ever streaming during a Tesla earnings call? Or one of Musk’s propaganda spaces with an international fascist leader? There are all sorts of ways a serious investigator could come at this.

 Look, I haven’t even mentioned the fact that there are actual recorded conversations between Elon Musk and Adrian Dittmann, which is something that is, bizarrely, almost never brought up.

There are easy hand-waves for this as well. People say that he’s pre-recording one audio track, then playing it over a space and speaking to it as his other persona. Again, this is trying to force evidence to fit a pre-decided conclusion, not the other way around. This is conspiracy thinking.

 This is embarrassing when it becomes mockable. We should not be giving any legitimate ammunition to the accusation that Musk and Trump’s critics are the Fake News side. The moment you give them a sniff of that, they will take that ball and they will run so far with it they will wade to fucking Madagascar. Which is exactly what happened when Dittmann, or maybe even someone else posing as him, decided to mess with people through the conduit of 4Chan.

 This is basic stuff, guys: The moment you use something that happens on 4Chan as evidence, you’ve lost. You’ve checkmated yourself. You’ve smash-kicked that ball so hard into your own goal that the goalposts are also now on fire. This is old, old, old internet lore, but people keep falling for it.

 Here’s what happened: Late in the media coverage, but before the Spectator article, screenshots emerged of an argument on 4Chan between a bunch of randoms and someone who has waived the traditional anonymity and identified himself as “Adrian Dittmann.” The account is arguing passionately in defense of Musk against all the big deal criticisms, like his drug use, and at one point embarrassingly insists that Elon “gets lots of sex.”

 It was leaped upon by left accounts like a corporate whistleblower leak as more evidence of just how pathetic Elon Musk really is. And stupid, too—because not only did he drop too many incidental hints of his secret identity, and of Musk’s secret neo-Nazi leanings, but “Dittmann” also accidentally posted a screenshot of his own X/Twitter account, including the admin setting that lets him easily switch back and forth between his alts! Haha, whoops, dipshit!!

This shouldn’t need to be reiterated but nothing, and I mean nothing, that comes out of 4Chan was just incidentally stumbled upon on 4Chan. One hundred percent of the time it was fed to you deliberately by someone who put it there deliberately. This is bait.

 The screenshot that is meant to look like a Twitter admin panel (but in a subtle way, to make you feel clever for spotting it), is a forgery.

It’s not even a good forgery. It doesn’t need to be a good forgery because nobody actually knows what a Twitter admin panel looks like. But even those who have tried to scour this image for the telltale signs of manipulation probably don’t need to go that far.

 X/Twitter doesn’t have the word “bans” in its lexicon. (They are suspensions.) The layout of this panel doesn’t make much sense at all as a functional toolset, and as The Verge eventually detailed by getting in touch with the rare employees who weren’t too scared to talk to the media, this is not what Twitter employees see.

 The left—and yes, I’m using that term in its broadest possible colloquial sense that is doubtlessly offensive to some of the parties under its umbrella—has a terrible habit of being baited by 4Chan into conspiracy or conspiracy-esque mindsets. I’ve written about this before. It is a deliberate play to poison the discourse, to distract, confuse, and divide, and to make us look like lunatics.

And it works. Because our susceptibility to things like confirmation bias and false-positive pattern seeking are attached to our human psyche, not to our political ideology. There are various theories as to why the right might be more readily susceptible, but it’s way too easy to let that lull us into the trap of thinking we’re immune.

 I’m not even saying I’m immune! Living a truth-seeking life in the current information environment is fucking hard. I get pulled the wrong way, probably, more times than I even know.

 But this is something that irritates me quite a bit about what can, I guess, loosely be described as the Elon Musk Haters community of the internet. It’s not just the eager susceptibility to every piece of bait, misinformation, fake tweet, or conspiracy theory that appears, but the viciousness and the dogpiles that you expect if you push back. After all, why would you want to protect Elon Musk from these accusations if you didn’t secretly love him? Or even work for him? You can’t be too careful, the spies and shills are everywhere.

I used to get a lot out of Reddit communities that effectively countered Musk’s bullshit but I rarely participate at all anymore due to three out of five trending topics always being some ludicrously obvious fake tweet…

…and having little patience for the dogpile that ensues when you ask for a little bit of critical thinking. When real journalists with otherwise rock-solid leftist cred like Matt Binder or actual conspiracy culture experts like Mike Rothschild admit they don’t adhere to the Dittmann-Musk conspiracy they’re answered by swarms of reply guys calling them a moron—haven’t you listened to the intonations??

 Dittmann isn’t even the only Musk sycophant that people think is one of his pseudonyms. For a long time, Reddit has largely believed that “DogeDesigner” is one of Musk’s alternate accounts, going into deep code-breaking conspiratorial detail…

…despite the fact that he’s constantly posting photos of himself standing next to Elon Musk.

We have to try to stop doing this.

 As silly and inconsequential as the Adrian Dittmann thing might seem, we need to recognise that all of us are susceptible to poor reasoning and fight the urge to attack anyone on our own side who calls it out. In the coming years we all need to keep a cool head and remember which side of the asylum we’re on.