When Elon Musk's Twitter account was hacked as part of a coordinated attack on dozens of high-profile accounts on July 15, the Tesla billionaire went straight to Twitter's CEO.
Accounts belonging to dozens of celebrities and public figures — including Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kim Kardashian West — tweeted a bitcoin scam, promising followers that if they sent money to a bitcoin wallet the celebrity would send back double the amount.
In an interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Musk — a prolific Twitter user with roughly 37 million followers — described how he learned about the hack and immediately called Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
"Within a few minutes of the post coming up, I immediately got texts from a bunch of people I know, then I immediately called Jack so probably within less than five minutes my account was locked," he said.
Musk also told The Times he was unwell when the hack occurred.
"I think I had food poisoning or something, so you throw up incredibly violently with food poisoning," he said. "So I was kind of ill during a lot of it, the Twitter takeover. But I think it's good anyway to take a few breaks from Twitter and not be on there 24 hours a day. Twitter can mess with your mind."
Twitter has determined that the hackers were able to view the private direct messages of 36 out of about 130 accounts affected.
When asked whether he was worried the hackers could have seen his private messages, Musk seemed unperturbed.
"I'm not that concerned about my DMs being made public," he told The Times. "I mean, we can probably cherry-pick some section of my DMs that sound bad out of context but overall my DMs mostly consist of swapping memes."
