Did Anonymous actually threaten Elon Musk?
Elon Musk looks puzzled, as he did not expect that someone would dare to threaten him. Did the well-known hacker group Anonymous really threaten him?
Greek meets Greek, or Musk was pointed at his place
The video with threats directed against Elon Musk, published on June 5, has gained more than a million views in 24 hours. “This is a message from Anonymous for Elon Musk,” the statement begins, in which the billionaire is told that he is “another narcissistic rich dude desperate for attention.”
Musk is being reproached for his viral Twitter posts concerning mostly Bitcoin, in addition to a number of defamatory statements that I will repeat here, but which appear to be taken from various media reports over the years.
“It seems that the games you played in the cryptocurrency markets destroyed lives”, the video message says that Musk chose the crypto market for his next fun, emitting through his tweets a disdain for the middle class of people. The speaker accused Musk of destroying the dreams of many people who had pinned their hopes on cryptocurrencies with his tweets. They trusted the head of Tesla as an authority, and he played on this trust.
The performance ended on an epic note, as Anonymous said that it was a mistake for millipreder to think that he was the smartest person on planet Earth, and that now he had incurred the wrath of an equal force. “We are Anonymous! We are the legion. Wait for us”.
Real Anonymous, please respond
The fact is that the most popular Anonymous Twitter account, YourAnonNews, with 6.7 million followers, has already claimed its involvement in the video. When asked if they could confirm that the video was posted by them, the tweet replied: “No, and all the best”.
The Anonymous @BscAnon account, which says it opposes the “ill-will prevalent in the cryptocurrency industry,” also denies any involvement. He tweeted, ” This is not our video to Elon Musk”.
Meanwhile, YourAnonCentral, an account with 5.9 million subscribers that seems to claim some affiliation with the hacking collective, said the video still belongs to Anonymous. In a blog post on June 5, YourAnonCentral said: “Hacker group Anonymous has released a new video challenging infamous billionaire Elon Musk after he brought down Bitcoin stocks. Anonymous wasted no time in exposing the controversial billionaire”.
Going back to the video itself, the YouTube page where it was posted has just 152,000 subscribers, and was created on December 24, 2015. In that time, it seems that only three videos have been posted, including this one. However, Anonymous ‘ official YouTube account, active since January 24, 2012, and has 3.51 million subscribers, has not posted any videos or links to it.
The Nature of Anonymity
As mentioned earlier, it is difficult to attribute anything to a group such as Anonymous. Not least because the nature of the decentralized hacker fraternity is such that anyone can claim to be part of it simply by, for example, posting a video.
This does not mean that Anonymous no longer exists in the real sense. When the threat to defame Donald Trump was mentioned almost exactly a year ago, Xia was quoted by the author of “Anonymous,” McGill University professor Gabriella Coleman, who told Reuters that she had been told that some key original members of Anonymous were involved.
So whether this is a serious step by hackers, or a step by an amateur is still unclear. However, the suspicion that Elon Musk will not lose sleep because of this “warning” is much clearer. But anyway, the entire crypto industry agrees with this video.