Twitter accounts of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Apple hacked

In a rather unprecedented cyber ‘attack’ Twitter accounts of big names and companies were reportedly hacked. According to multiple online reports, a bitcoin-related cyber scam was the origin of the hack and accounts of Apple, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, were among others that were hacked.

As per a report by The Verge, the ‘scam’ first came to light when a tweet was sent out from Musk’s account. The tweet read, “I‘m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” A bitcoin address was also mentioned in the tweet, which was soon deleted.

Soon, another tweet was sent out, which read, “Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.” However, a few minutes later this particular tweet was also deleted.

Twitter confirmed the hack in a tweet posted by the official Twitter Support account. “We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly,” said the company in a tweet.


Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also made a statement on the matter in a tweet:


A couple of hours later, Twitter temporarily ‘blocked’ the hacked accounts. In another tweet, the company said, “We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience.”

Bill Gates’ spokesperson told Recode that there was no tweet sent out by Microsoft’s co-founder. “We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”

Some of the other big-name Twitter accounts that were compromised include Barack Obama, Kanye West and Joe Biden.