WaPo Reporters Banned from Twitter Identify Man Musk Claimed Stalked Him: An UberEats Driver Obsessed With Grimes But ‘No Link’ to ElonJet

This is the type of story that sounds like a large gang of media nerds got wildly inebriated and played several rounds of mad libs, but apparently it’s just 2022 driving home the point that we are truly living in the weirdest of timelines.

Two reporters who were knocked off Twitter by Elon Musk’s ban hammer have tracked down his alleged stalker, got the local cops to confirm there’s “no link” to @ElonJet, but the stalker himself is a truly bizarre and disturbing person.

One main storyline of Musk’s chaotic reign as “Chief Twit” has been his sparring with Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old University of Central Florida college student who used to run the @ElonJet Twitter account, which tracked Musk’s private jet, along with several other accounts tracking jets of other billionaires, Russian oligarchs and so forth.

Musk also claimed that a “stalker” had recently jumped on the hood of the car in which his young child was traveling, posting a video of the alleged stalker and showing the license plate of the man’s car.

Twitter recently banned both the @ElonJet account and Sweeney’s personal account, and then suspended a group of journalists whom Musk accused of “doxxing” him by sharing his “real-time location,” or — as the frequently dramatic Tesla and SpaceX CEO phrased it — “assassination coordinates.”

Among the reporters who were ensnared in suspensions, or — as we frequently dramatic media types phrased it — the “Thursday Night Massacre,” was Drew Harwell of the Washington Post.

Harwell and the other banned journalists disputed Musk’s accusations that they had doxxed him or shared his real-time location, and Harwell was even able to confront Musk about it directly (albeit briefly) in a Twitter Space on Friday.

Harwell’s account was restored this weekend, along with several other reporters, but notable exceptions remained suspended. (Update: Harwell’s account is no longer suspended, but does remain locked, and he is still unable to tweet, Mediaite has confirmed.)

On Saturday, Harwell’s WaPo colleague Taylor Lorenz tweeted at Musk that the two of them were working on a story and had emailed him several times for comment but had not received a response.

Then Lorenz’s Twitter account was suspended.

Musk claimed it was a “temporary suspension,” Lorenz shared an email saying the suspension was permanent, but she was then restored on the platform.

Lorenz’s account was apparently locked for a retroactive application of a new policy restricting the promotion of competing social media platforms. CNN anchor Jim Acosta’s account has been locked for the same reason, also retroactively.

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1604559889585410048?s=20&t=HTp3umuIAF7LU1QqpWtS0w

Musk has since apologized and promised that any new major policy changes will be handled by a vote, and posted a new poll asking if he should step down as head of Twitter.

Sunday evening, Harwell and Lorenz published the article for which they were attempting to contact Musk for comment.

Headlined “Elon Musk blamed a Twitter account for a stalker. Police see no link,” the article reported that the alleged stalking incident occurred “at a gas station 26 miles from Los Angeles International Airport and 23 hours after the @ElonJet account had last located the jet’s whereabouts,” facts which “cast doubt” on Musk’s accusations.

As Harwell and Lorenz reported, the LAPD had “yet to find a link” between the accused stalker and @ElonJet. They identified the driver of the car as Brandon Collado using the video Musk had tweeted, and described him as an UberEats driver who had rented the car in question from car-sharing service Turo. Collado confirmed he was the person in Musk’s video, and shared his own videos of the incident with the reporters.

Here’s where it gets weird.

In his interviews with the Post, Collado “acknowledged he has an interest in Musk and the mother of two of Musk’s children, the musician known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher,” and made “several bizarre and unsupported claims.”

Boucher, the mother of Musk’s two-year-old son X Æ A-Xii (he usually refers to the child as “X”), lives near the gas station where the incident reportedly happened.

Among Collado’s disturbing comments to the Post were his beliefs that “Boucher was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts; that Musk was monitoring his real-time location; and that Musk could control Uber Eats to block him from receiving delivery orders.”

Multiple reporters — including several caught up in the week’s suspensions — had posted that the LAPD had confirmed it had not received a police report about the incident. According to the Post, South Pasadena police officers had arrived at the scene shortly after it allegedly occurred, questioned Collado, and said they would file a report, but he told the Post that no one from the police had contacted him.

Stalking is a “pervasive problem” in Los Angeles due to all of the city’s famous denizens, and the LAPD has a special unit dedicated to the issue. Marc Madero, an LAPD detective with this unit, told the Post that they had investigated a man accused of stalking Boucher and whether or not Collado was that man or connected in some way, but had not yet made a determination.

Madero said their investigations had not uncovered any evidence showing Collado had used @ElonJet, although stalkers frequently take advantage of “open-source searches of a targeted individual.”

“Nothing would surprise me,” he added.

Read the full report at the Washington Post.