Elon Musk jokes that Janet Yellen may have fallen for a crypto giveaway scam amid reports that her computer was accessed in the Treasury breach.
Over the past month, cybersecurity concerns have sprung up in the U.S. as the Department of Treasury disclosed that it faced a hack allegedly by Chinese agents in December 2024. Recent reports suggesting that the breach also affected systems of high-ranking officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have further intensified the severity of the situation.
However, despite the seriousness of the situation the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has not missed the opportunity to take a jab at Yellen using crypto, one of his favorite pastimes, as a battering ram.
“Send Me 1 BTC, I Send You 2 BTC”
Responding to reports that bad actors accessed Secretary Janet Yellen’s computer in the claimed China-backed Treasury hack, Tesla CEO Elon Musk joked that the economist may have fallen for a crypto giveaway scam.
“Maybe she clicked on the ‘send me 1 btc, I send you 2btc’ email,” the billionaire wrote in an X post on Friday, January 17, eliciting laughs from his fan base.
Maybe she clicked on the “send me 1 btc, I send you 2btc” email 😂 https://t.co/mtIfZ4Cd4Z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 17, 2025
Musk is referring to fraudulent Bitcoin doubling schemes often peddled by scammers, especially when impersonating influential figures like the Tesla billionaire.
To be clear, the Treasury reported the breach in December as a supply chain attack instead of a direct breach of its own systems.
For context, a supply chain attack is a type of cybersecurity attack that aims to infiltrate an organization using a third-party service provider. In this case, the Treasury claimed the compromised third party was BeyondTrust, a cybersecurity service provider.
Musk’s recent jab at Yellen comes as no love has been lost between the two over the years.
In April 2023, Musk seemed to question Yellen’s ability to do her job, asserting that he would rather have Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet as Treasury Secretary.
Months before, in November 2022, Yellen had suggested that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) may need to investigate the billionaire’s purchase of X (then still Twitter).
The CFIUS is an interagency legislative committee presently led by Yellen. It was established to evaluate the national security risks of foreign investments in the U.S. economy.
Read the full article here
