--- title: "This Is How Hackers Accessed Elon Musk’s Twitter Account" description: "Details are starting to emerge about how hackers accessed the Twitter acounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West and a rash of other public figures." date: "2020-07-31" modified: "2020-07-31" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/hackers-elon-musk-twitter" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "cybersecurity" - "elon musk" - "the digest" - "twitter" --- # This Is How Hackers Accessed Elon Musk’s Twitter Account ![Details are starting to emerge about how hackers accessed the Twitter acounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West and a rash of other public figures.]() *\Image: Andrew Mckie/Futurism\* ## Tweetstorm Remember the epic Twitter hack earlier this month, when ne'er-do-wells [seized control of the Twitter accounts]() of celebrities and business figures ranging from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, musician Kanye West and presidential hopeful Joe Biden? Details have slowly been dribbling out about how the hack occurred — and now, new disclosures from Twitter's own investigation are starting to piece together a fuller picture of one of the most sweeping social media security breaches in history. Twitter [admitted today]() that the hackers gained access to the accounts by "spear phishing" a number of its employees — sending them messages, basically, that are designed to trick them into extracting their login credentials. Once the hackers gained access, [the company said](), they accessed 130 Twitter accounts. They opened the direct messages of 36 of the accounts, downloaded the Twitter data from seven, and tweeted a bitcoin scam from 45 others. ## Human Error There are two key takeaways from Twitter's latest revelations about the hack. The first is that a successful hack doesn't need to be particularly sophisticated — in this case, one of the most prominent social media sites on Earth was defeated by its own employees opening bogus links on their phones. The second is that unknown hackers likely now have access to the account data and direct messages of dozens of high profile users, meaning it's possible that the private communications of Musk, Gates or West are now floating around the web. Musk, for one, doesn't seem too concerned about his messages leaking online. "I’m not that concerned about my DMs being made public," he [told the *New York Times* last week](). "I mean, we can probably cherry pick some section of my DMs that sound bad out of context but overall my DMs mostly consist of swapping memes." **READ MORE:** [Twitter hack: Staff tricked by phone spear-phishing scam]() \[*BBC*\] **More on the Twitter hack:** [*Someone Apparently Just Hacked Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and Kanye West*]() ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()