Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky temporarily lost control of his X account this week, resulting in a string of unauthorized posts promoting the tokenization of real-world assets. The breach caused immediate confusion across financial media, with several outlets initially reporting his sudden endorsement of blockchain technology.
Chesky officially reclaimed his account and removed the offending posts by Tuesday evening. X’s internal security team classified the intrusion as a critical security vulnerability and locked down the profile.
What We Know
- The compromised account shared a Tuesday thread claiming blockchain removes the “friction” of ownership, accompanied by a video of Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev.
- MarketWatch originally published a report on July 14 taking the statements at face value before issuing an updated correction.
- Chesky confirmed the situation on Thursday with a direct message to users who followed him during the breach.
The hackers utilized large language models to generate the fraudulent content. The AI detection tool Pangram analyzed the hacker’s posts and flagged the text as 100% AI-generated. Social media users quickly identified the machine-written hallmarks, pointing out the unnatural sentence structures and a distinct lack of commas throughout the thread.
The situation reached a conclusion on Thursday when the CEO formally addressed the influx of blockchain enthusiasts to his profile. He handled the fallout with humor, explicitly stating his X account was hacked earlier in the week. He thanked the person responsible for the new followers but warned them he would be a “very disappointing follow.”
The Long History of High-Profile Tech Executive Hacks
This incident places Chesky alongside several other prominent tech leaders who have dealt with targeted social media breaches. In 2016, unauthorized users compromised Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter account. Three years later, a highly publicized breach of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s own profile forced the company to permanently disable its SMS repost feature. These repeated vulnerabilities demonstrate that even Silicon Valley executives remain susceptible to basic account takeover tactics.