The 2021 Anonymous Video Against Elon Musk: Claims Checked

Originally published 2021-06-07.

In early June 2021 a video began circulating in which a masked figure, speaking in the name of Anonymous, accused Elon Musk of toying with cryptocurrency markets through his tweets and hurting ordinary investors. It ended with the group's familiar warning, "Expect us". The video was real and widely shared, but whoever made it was never identified, and because Anonymous has no membership list, nobody can say it spoke for "the" Anonymous.

Here is what the video claimed, which parts of it hold up, which need context, and what Anonymous actually is.

What the video said

The clip followed the classic Anonymous format: a figure in a Guy Fawkes mask, the face popularised by the comic and film V for Vendetta, and a heavily distorted voice. It appeared over the weekend of the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, as Musk's influence on crypto prices was a hot topic.

The narrator's main charges were:

• that Musk's posts about Bitcoin and Dogecoin had moved prices sharply and cost small investors money;
• that his reversal on Bitcoin, after praising it, came only once he faced criticism over its energy use;
• that his talk of saving the world was driven more by ego and a saviour complex than by real concern for people;
• that he had shrugged off a coup in Bolivia, a country rich in lithium;
• that children worked in mines supplying battery materials for Tesla.

The speaker also mocked Musk's plans for Mars and dismissed him as "just another narcissistic rich dude who is desperate for attention".

Musk and the 2021 crypto swings

The core complaint was grounded in real events. In February 2021 Tesla disclosed that it had bought 1.5 billion dollars' worth of Bitcoin and said it would accept the currency for cars. In its first-quarter results Tesla reported that selling part of that holding had a positive impact of 101 million dollars, at a time when its quarterly net profit was a record 438 million dollars. That is notable, but it does not support the claim, repeated online at the time, that Tesla earned more from Bitcoin than from selling cars.

In May 2021 Musk announced that Tesla would stop accepting Bitcoin payments, citing the energy used to mine it, and prices fell. He was also the best-known cheerleader for Dogecoin, a coin created in 2013 as a joke about crypto speculation. His tweets repeatedly coincided with big jumps: a post in April 2021 was followed by a rise of more than 100 percent. When he hosted Saturday Night Live on 8 May 2021 and played a character in a sketch who called Dogecoin a hustle, the price dropped by almost 30 percent during the broadcast.

Is that market manipulation?

Critics called it manipulation. Legally it is murkier, because cryptocurrencies were not regulated like shares, so the rules that bar executives from moving stock prices with misleading statements did not clearly apply. What is not in doubt is that following a celebrity's posts into a volatile asset can be costly, which is the practical lesson many small investors took from 2021.

The Bolivia tweet behind the coup accusation

The coup charge refers to a real exchange. In July 2020 a Twitter user accused the US government of backing a coup against Bolivia's former president Evo Morales so that Musk could get lithium. Musk replied: "We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it." The fact-checking site Truth or Fiction found archived copies showing the reply stayed up for about two days before it was deleted.

Some background helps. Morales resigned in November 2019 after protests over a disputed election and pressure from the army; his supporters call his removal a coup, while opponents call it a popular uprising against electoral fraud. Bolivia has some of the world's largest lithium resources, and Morales had insisted on state control of them. There is no public evidence that Tesla played any role in his fall, and Musk's reply is best understood as a flippant, provocative joke rather than a confession. Still, many people found it callous, and that is what the video seized on.

The child labour claim

The video accused Musk of buying lithium from companies using child workers. The concern about children in battery supply chains is real, but it centres mainly on cobalt rather than lithium. The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies well over half the world's cobalt, and child labour in its small-scale, hand-dug mines is widely documented.

A lawsuit brought by the group International Rights Advocates on behalf of Congolese families named Tesla alongside Apple, Microsoft, Dell and others over deaths and injuries of children in cobalt mines. The case was later dismissed. Tesla has said it works to source responsibly and has tried to reduce the cobalt in its batteries. So the video pointed at a genuine human-rights issue, but stated it loosely.

Who or what is Anonymous?

Anonymous began around 2003 on the image board 4chan, where users posted without names. It became known as a hacktivist movement in 2008 with Project Chanology, a campaign of pranks, website attacks and street protests against the Church of Scientology. The Guy Fawkes masks were chosen for those protests partly because they were easy to buy.

The key point for this story is that Anonymous has no leaders, no membership and no official channel. As the journalist Carole Cadwalladr put it, if you call yourself Anonymous, you are Anonymous. That means anyone with a mask and voice-changing software can publish a video under the name, and there is no way to verify who stands behind it. Since 2009 dozens of people in several countries have been arrested for cyberattacks carried out under the Anonymous banner. The movement re-emerged in 2020 with a video aimed at Minneapolis police after the murder of George Floyd.

What came of the threat

Musk did not respond publicly when the video first spread, and we found no reliable report of a hack or leak against him or his companies that was credibly linked to it. Like many messages issued under the Anonymous name, its main effect was attention: millions of views, and a fresh round of debate about how much power one billionaire's posts should have over markets.

The fair summary is that the video mixed solid points (Musk's posts really did move crypto prices, and he really did post the Bolivia reply) with exaggeration and vague accusations. Its claim to speak for a hacker collective could never be checked.

Sources: VTPost: Anonymous releases video threatening Elon Musk; CNBC, 26 April 2021: Tesla's bitcoin sales boosted profits; Truth or Fiction: Did Elon Musk tweet "We will coup whoever we want"?; Wikipedia: Dogecoin; Wikipedia: Anonymous (hacker group); Wikipedia: Mining industry of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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