I'll bet that Bill Gates doesn't have much on his Twitter, but I'll also bet Elon Musk has some crazy DMs.

They potentially had access to any account they wanted. You don't know that they weren't snarfing DMs on interesting accounts while having the celeb accounts panhandle for bitcoin after.

Is Musks account really publicly managed? He probably has an agency helping him but I doubt he'd use another account for DMs.

You'd be surprised. Some celebrities might engage in salacious activities via DM but even the most boring corporation can have lots of customer information in support chats.

Or they were but it was kept secret. Twitter hasn't published a list, we only know of the BTC tweets. Maybe they actually were after other accounts' DMs and the tweets are just diversion to make it seem like an undirected attack.

Unless we hear from account holders that their credentials weren't stolen, there's no reason to believe that only those were hacked that sent tweets.

If DMs were the real loot, the tweets were a "proof of work" (to show the accounts had really been owned).

You can prove you have 'blackmail materials' just by proving you own the bitcoin wallet.

They needed to reset credentials so this could've never been a stealth attack. By making it public, any later leak of DMs is much more likely to be accepted as authentic. Without that, most people would've doubted the authenticity of leaked material.

Perhaps it is a form of proof that they actually have access to the accounts and thus the DMs. Just posting claimed DMs that can be deleted and denied has a lower probability of being believed.

Kill 2 birds with one stone? Once you stole the data why not double-dip and make extra money by pulling a scam?

Direct messages - so private messages to and from