It looks like Elon Musk has an even bigger sycophant than his AI model Grok.
According to a new analysis by The Washington Post, the world’s richest man appears to be obsessed with an anonymous account on X named “XFreeze” that he’s interacted with more than any other user on the platform this year. And naturally, the main thing XFreeze posts about is Musk.
The account, which WaPo traced to a man in India, constantly lavishes the site’s owner with praise: boosting his business ventures, attacking his enemies, and sharing inane memes that Musk invariably loves. Two years ago, XFreeze’s following was nonexistent, but today the account boasts over 200,000 followers, after assiduously courting the billionaire’s attention.
As the reporting gets into, it’s a symbiotic relationship. Musk has a prominent mouthpiece that he can constantly boost to create the illusion of organic, popular support. And the account gets to cash in on the ridiculous amount of engagement that Musk’s endorsements drive.
“Musk loves to be glazed, and this person is the doughnut factory,” Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, told WaPo.
XFreeze’s constant adulation of Musk is a “cultural hack,” she added. “It’s very clear to me that this communication is for one person alone.”
On top of exemplifying Musk’s long-held pattern of surrounding himself with yes-men, it’s also an example of Musk’s tireless quest to reshape reality around himself, and drive narratives that support his worldview. His “maximum truth-seeking AI” Grok was created as anti-woke answer to the tech industry’s muzzled, politically correct chatbots. He bought Twitter, a left-leaning epicenter of internet culture and a key pipeline for dispersing news, and turned it into a space where he can safely share edgy memes, racist conspiracy theories, and boost self-identified Nazis. Believing Wikipedia to be too “woke,” he even created an entire knockoff version written by his AI called Grokipedia.
XFreeze, in that context, has been a godsend for Musk. Three out of every four posts the account has made this year were about Musk or his businesses like SpaceX and Tesla, WaPo found, with the remainder covering Musk’s favorite bugbears like wokeness and crime. Recent XFreeze posts that Musk has reshared include a post summarizing his biographer Walter Isaacson’s explanation on how Musk builds rockets, another post calling Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink the “invisible backbone of Earth,” and another post made on Mother’s Day with an interview snippet of his mother calling him a “genius and a good person.”
You have to admire the effort. Shortly after creating the account in 2024, XFreeze sent this tweet into the void: “How do I reach 100 followers on X?” After months of tweeting about various tech related topics and going nowhere, XFreeze made a now minorly historic declaration: “Sit tight and have a view while I am working my way up the ladder.” In the months following, the Musk flunky act began.
XFreeze’s tireless glazing has proved particularly useful for Musk during his blockbuster trial against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. While a judge ordered Musk to stop tweeting about the trial after he repeatedly attacked the OpenAI camp, including by quoting XFreeze posts that echoed some of Musk’s sensational claims, XFreeze continued its assault on OpenAI and Altman in his stead.
Donovan speculated that Musk is boosting XFreeze because he wants his opinions “to come from a different source,” because the billionaire “is not getting the press he wants” about his lawsuit against OpenAI.
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