The Adrian Dittmann Story
the evidence, from A to Z, and righting the wrongsHere's the deal: Adrian Dittmann is not Elon Musk, and we have concrete evidence.
This began as a story with Jackie Sweet, a freelance journalist with history writing for The Intercept, Mother Jones, and so on. We found the initial lead and presented it to Jackie, but she was ultimately agreed to be our byliner — the actual writer for the story, the sole contributor being credited in the space under the title, and the one being paid for the piece. As such, Jackie got to choose the outlet we pitched to, and we ended up with an article in the US edition of the right-wing Spectator that was arguably poorly presented, cut out graphics and information crucial to the investigation, and crucially did not give credit to us.
Here's the evidence in full, including a significant amount that the Spectator article missed, and how things fell apart from our point of view.
The lead
It starts on December 29, when Adrian Dittmann was making a resurgence on X (formerly Twitter) after joining a Space sounding like Elon Musk. He had long been accused of being a Musk alt by folks on all sides of the political spectrum, including by the 'journalists' at InfoWars (who called him "NOT Elon Musk" in headlines and interviewed him multiple times).
On the 29th, maia searched his name in a tool that scans through public data breaches — mass releases of hacked information often including emails, phone numbers, and names — and discovered an "Adrian Dittmann" in a breach for AI photo editing platform Cutout.Pro connecting to an email and IP address.
The IP address was roughly geolocated to Fiji, and the email gave us more to work with. Its Google profile picture appears to show the account's owner, who appears young, and his partner; on Google Maps, he had once reviewed a restaurant on Denarau Island, western Fiji.
Of course, at this point, we didn't know if this was the same Adrian Dittmann as the one on X. We kept in mind his face, location, and a few extra clues dug up using the tool osint.industries, including two phone number hints in Fiji ( 679) and Germany ( 49) connected to the aforefound email address.
A search of the @AdrianDittmann X account shows correlative evidence: the account operator claimed in June 2023 to be German (link, left in below video), and he claimed in July 2023 to have grown up in Gibraltar and to have lived in Morocco but to currently reside in Oceania (link via Trevor Owens, right in below video).
Multiple screenshots showing the X account's time zone information align with the Oceania statement and the prior Fiji identification — one shows a Business Insider dateline with the timezone "GMT 12" (link, left), and another shows an X post made at 22:43 UTC with a Dittmann time stamp of "10:43 am" (link 1, link 2, right). These align with UTC 12, a time zone consisting of far eastern Russia, New Zealand, and some countries in Oceania including Fiji.
A scan of commercial "people-search" websites only showed one Dittmann family living in the entirety of the time zone, which gave us a tentative conclusion: the email and X belonged to the same Adrian Dittmann. But such websites rely on incomplete databases scraped mostly from digital activity, and it's very common to miss people; we instead searched for a concrete link.
Scouring social media
A common strategy in investigative journalism is to run with all tentative links until you can't anymore, either by not finding any data at all (rendering the investigation inconclusive) or finding data that conclusively proves or disproves the link. It's a method that isn't foolproof to mental cherry-picking or similar fallacies, but it would do here.
We decided to follow the social media trail from here: maia had found that a Google keyword search for Dittmann's name and supposed country, Fiji, brought up a private Instagram account under his name. When considering how to continue the investigation, maia decided to talk to the aforementioned Jackie Sweet, who is notable for her work in social media investigation; Jackie quickly found a public Facebook account with the same name and an edited and zoomed-in version of the profile picture.
After a later request for comment, the Facebook account was wiped and its profile picture was reuploaded to make it appear new. Prior to deletion, however, it had one photo of Dittmann and his partner facing one another on a trip to the Philippines, where his partner appears to be from. It isn't clear if they're the same people from the Google profile picture.
Jackie found that the Dittmann X account had indeed referred to his "significant other" before and even made multiple AI-generated images resembling her, describing her in comments as "[F]ilipino, just more from the Spanish side" (link 1, link 2).
That's nothing conclusive, but it doesn't disprove anything either. Tracing back a bit, however, the Instagram profile had another clue: the account repeatedly collaborative-posted with a number of accounts, including one appearing to belong to his partner, another appearing to belong to his brother (both with the Dittmann surname), and a couple belonging to the Fijian water company Aquam Insula.
The corporate ladder
Lo and behold, Jackie found that at the opening of Aquam Insula's "Maritime Lifestyle Warehouse" on Denarau Island, B-roll footage from a recorded speech by the President of Fiji shows Adrian Dittmann and his partner in the foreground (link, 3:05).
It is in this recording that we find the first conclusive link: Adrian has a ring on his left ring finger (above link, 0:40, left), matching the same left-ring-finger ring that appears in multiple cooking videos and streams that he's posted on X (link, video, right).
And another conclusive link: within an hour following an email sent by Jackie on January 1 to the original email address discovered in the Cutout.Pro breach that mentioned the cooking videos, a significant amount of these cooking videos and streams were deleted from the Dittmann X account. The analytics platform SocialBlade documents that his total post count decreased by 38 that day (link), a stark outlier compared to the usual increase.
At this point in the investigation, all links we'd found had been a match. But there was one end still missing: is there any indication this Fijian could be from Gibraltar?
And yes, tracing back up the corporate ladder, there is: Aquam Insula, the aforementioned water company Dittmann is associated with, is a subsidiary of Totoka Islands (link), whose "sister company" Framesoft (with its primary registration being in Fiji) has a UK branch registered to a condominium in Gibraltar (link 1, link 2). Its CEO is of German nationality, as Dittmann has been shown to be, and he shares the Dittmann surname.
Per the above, we're certain that Adrian Dittmann is from Fiji and not Elon Musk. Multiple subjects mentioned in this piece were contacted for comment by both us and Jackie, but all either refused to speak on the record or ignored us entirely.
How publication went down
With Jackie responsible for writing and pitching, she decided to go with The Spectator's US branch as her publication of choice, and we naively went along with it. A part of the conditions from the start was that we would get "appropriate credit" for our work on this piece, even outside of the byline.
But that didn't happen. Jackie asked us how we wanted to be credited a few hours before the piece went live, and she told us that she had an italicized statement below the article body describing that we contributed to research — we were fine with that. Yet when the article went live, and as we (once again naively) shared it around on social media before having read it, we came to realize that we were neither credited in the piece nor in her social media posts.
According to Jackie, The Spectator decided to remove the line describing our contributions without informing her, citing maia's "notoriety" at the publication for the removal of its name and giving no reason for the removal of ryan's. But they still published most of the rest of the article as-is, minus at least one image that would have served as visual evidence, apparently blindly trusting the research of those names they couldn't bear to keep in the final article. Some of the blame may also lie with Jackie; the article rather poorly presents the research above, leaving out critical evidence (including many in visual form) and making it difficult to follow our reasoning.
In short, we don't think the article is very good, and we're unhappy with how our work was used without credit. But despite not being proud of the piece, maia's posts remain up (as does ryan's statement): we believe that credit is a crucial part of journalism and research as a whole, and if by leveraging popularity around the article's release is the only way to bring attention to that, so be it.
If you have any additions to this story, please text ryan on Signal at rhinozz.1337.
Update January 5 19:45 UTC
11 hours after publishing this piece, links to it and the original Spectator piece were blocked, and at least the X accounts of maia, ryan, and Jackie were suspended for 30 days. No rule was cited for the suspension.