An anonymous user of the social platform X shot a plea into the ether in late 2024. “How do I reach 100 followers on X?” the account with the username XFreeze asked.
That post didn’t receive a single like, share or reply, but within months, XFreeze appears to have launched a strategy that propelled the account to become one of the platform’s most visible: Court the man in charge, Elon Musk.
XFreeze rose to become the account Musk engaged with more than any other on X in 2026, according to a Washington Post analysis, by tirelessly praising the billionaire owner of X and his other ventures, including Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk, who has around 240 million followers on X, replied to or shared XFreeze posts more than 400 times this year, The Post found, spreading the account’s laudatory claims about his achievements and using its posts to attack his opponents in the ongoing trial over his lawsuit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and company leaders including CEO Sam Altman.
Several XFreeze posts critical of Musk’s legal targets were among those shared or written by the billionaire last month that prompted the judge in the federal trial to ask him to pull back on posting about the case.
In an online milieu teeming with sycophants and reply guys, the rise of XFreeze from total unknown to the upper stratospheres of Musk fandom is a case study in how a savvy user can hack the incentive structure of X and the psychology of its billionaire owner. The account’s ascent shows how Musk can draw on boost obscure posts by his fans to shape public narratives around his business interests or legal battles, a symbiotic relationship that can bring those he elevates bigger payouts from X’s revenue sharing or subscription programs.
Musk has shared or reposted seven of XFreeze’s posts relating to his opponents in his lawsuit against OpenAI this year. Four came on April 27, the day the trial opened, including an XFreeze post that Musk pinned to his profile that alleged OpenAI co-founders Altman and Greg Brockman “stole a charity,” echoing a line frequently used by Tesla CEO. The next day, the judge scolded Musk for X posts relating to the case, and asked Musk and Altman to refrain from posting about the trial. Both have done so but XFreeze has continued to post about OpenAI and Altman.
Altman, Brockman and OpenAI have denied Musk’s allegations in court and claimed his suit is an attempt to hobble a competitor to his own artificial intelligence venture, xAI, the parent company of X. The firms were absorbed into SpaceX after the rocket builder acquired xAI earlier this year.
Musk, xAI and X did not respond to requests for comment. The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.
“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, said of XFreeze. She described the account’s adulation of Musk as a “cultural hack,” and added, “It’s very clear to me that this communication is for one person alone.”
Business leaders have long tapped partners and brand ambassadors to amplify and spread their ideas, usually figures with established gravitas or relevant expertise. Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had designer Jony Ive. More recently, many brands pay online content creators to promote their products in posts that disclose they are promotional.
XFreeze is an anonymous account that stands to earn money from X indirectly when Musk elevates a post. The platform allows high-profile accounts in countries such as the United States and India to earn a cut of the money their engagement generates for X. Musk long resisted engaging in traditional advertising at Tesla and has said he views corporate communications as “propaganda.”
The Post could not independently determine who is behind XFreeze. The account appears to have ties to India and to an individual who last year sought a job at xAI, which offers the chatbot Grok, according to a review of the account and a document created in April 2025 titled “I am XFreeze.” Musk first interacted with the account in July 2025.
The 78-page document reviewed by The Post reads like a job pitch and features an extensive list of bug fixes and improvements for Grok that the author claims to have relayed to xAI employees. “While I’m not located near an xAI office at the moment, I’m fully open to relocating,” the document said. “No delay in joining — I’m ready to start working immediately.”
The Post traced a name on the document to a person in India who did not respond to phone calls or text messages. It is unclear whether the person who created the XFreeze document was ever hired by xAI.
Musk has also paid XFreeze directly. The billionaire is among the 157 accounts with a $5 monthly subscription for exclusive content from the account.
“Wokeness gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue” –– Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/lm3zrbWWlW
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) May 12, 2026
In the months after its first post on X in July 2024, XFreeze’s operator appeared to be flailing as they tried to win attention. The account posted about a range of topics including global politics, the detention of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and seemingly AI-assisted music that XFreeze was posting on YouTube.
One day in August 2024, XFreeze signaled a strategy shift, announcing it to its then-minuscule following: “Sit tight and have a view while I am working my way up the ladder.”
In the following months, XFreeze lavished praise on Musk, echoing the billionaire’s own posts and rattling out updates that promoted the entrepreneur’s companies and products, including Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink internet service, and Grok.
“GROK is amazing and it keeps getting better,” XFreeze wrote in one post. “We’re closer to the future then we thought,” said another, after Musk unveiled Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle and a robot bus at a company event.
By 2025, XFreeze had begun to focus on providing fixes to improve Grok. The author of the “I am XFreeze” document indicated that the aim was to gain the attention of people working at xAI. “Over the past 4 months, I’ve dedicated nearly every waking hour to supporting, improving, and amplifying Grok and the xAI mission,” they wrote.
The author appears to have taken Musk’s self-described “hardcore” work ethic to heart and described staying awake throughout the night, until 9 a.m., to walk through issues in back-and-forths with Grok team members.
“For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been working full-time — day and night — on xAI,” the author wrote. The document names Grok employees that the author claims to have communicated with about “major issues and [user interface] suggestions,” and details their work on “image generation issues,” “identifying critical bugs in real-time,” and “tiny glitches that were unknown until I discovered them.”
The document repeatedly references the experiences of users based in India, including the difficulty of buying certain credits for Grok. The author explains that they found attempts to buy the credits were blocked when using Indian credit cards.
The XFreeze profile on X states that the account is based in the U.S., but the platform has added an icon indicating that a virtual private network could have been used to “change the country or region that is displayed on their profile.”
In March last year, XFreeze’s efforts appeared to be paying off. An xAI employee publicly thanked the account for helping out with bug reports. The “I am XFreeze” document was created the following month.
Now it’s still early days and there are some rough edges we continue to push the envelope and improve. Shout out to @amXFreeze, @ashraf_ruslan0 and all those how helped with bug reports and surfaces issues constructively. Keep it coming!
— Attila (@attilablenesi) March 27, 2025
Musk began engaging with XFreeze soon after, in July 2025, and it has continued to post positively about him since. Three out of every four posts from the account this year relate to the billionaire owner and his ventures like Tesla, with the remainder often touching on Musk’s favorite topics, like European overregulation, crime and wokeness.
In March, Musk re-shared an XFreeze post featuring an interview with his biographer Walter Isaacson detailing the billionaire’s strategy for building rockets from “first principles.” The following month, Musk shared a post from XFreeze in which the account said Musk’s Starlink internet service “quietly became the invisible backbone of Earth.” On Mother’s Day, Musk reposted an XFreeze post featuring a video of Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, that received 2.6 million views.
Since taking over Twitter in 2022 and later rebranding it to X, Musk has overhauled the platform in ways that could have helped an account like XFreeze’s to flourish. In 2023, the tech news site Platformer reported that Musk had ordered changes to Twitter’s algorithm after claiming that it failed to show his posts to enough users.
Donovan said that Musk might be boosting XFreeze because he wants his own opinions “to come from a different source,” at a moment when the billionaire “is not getting the press he wants,” out his lawsuit against OpenAI.
Musk has sometimes sent direct feedback to XFreeze in response to its posts praising him. “We should be thanking Elon for single-handedly saving free speech and giving us a real voice and freedom,” the account wrote in early December.
Musk replied directly, sending XFreeze a red heart emoji.
The post Elon Musk’s anonymous online BFF spreads his ideas and attacks his enemies appeared first on Washington Post.
