What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Fake Elon Musk Stories
The internet's disinformation merchants are, for some reason, focusing their energy and algorithms on one man this week: Elon Musk. In real life, Musk is the richest man in the world and has been tapped to head the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during the upcoming Trump administration, so it makes sense that people are talking about him. But why so many people are telling such elaborate lies about the guy is mysterious.
Below are 25-odd lies about Elon Musk.
Elon Musk did not buy Ford
This rumor is more than a one-off tweet. It comes by way of YouTube, where a channel called WealthUp has posted a nearly 40-minute video describing the merger of Ford and Tesla`. The vid breaks down the numbers and speculates as to what the merger would mean to the stock market and consumers, just like a real newscast. It's backed up with tweets and news reports too. But it's all bullshit. The video is entirely AI, based on nothing, and produced to generate traffic. It's working, too: it's been viewed 22,000 times as I post this.
WealthUp seems to only post AI-produced videos about Elon Musk, including the story of Elon Musk helping a homeless woman, giving his first class seat on a plane to a "Black elderly," confronting Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, Robert DeNiro, Jimmy Kimmel, Michelle Obama, and Meghan Markle.
Elon Musk did not reunite a lost girl on a bus with her mother and buy them a house
Videos about the good deeds of Elon Musk aren't only on YouTube. Over on Facebook, an account called Elon Videos is busily posting completely fake videos about Saint Elon. This one is about the time that Musk was riding a public bus (seriously) and he noticed a lost little girl holding a tattered teddy bear. Musk found her mother and bought them a house. Heartwarming, touching and 100% fake. This heroic act had been attributed to Keanu Reeves, Eminem, and others previously, and it's partially based on a real story, but it didn't really take off until Musk was cast as the hero.
Elon Musk is not going to release the Epstein files and the Diddy files
The version of Elon Musk covered by Facebook page SpaceX Fanclub isn't into spontaneous charity to "Black elderly" or anyone else. He's a vengeful Musk, who is going to release "Bombshell Diddy and Epstein Client List" on Jan. 20, block "pride content" on Twitter, and bring down Dreamworks for being too woke. This Musk is pure get-back-at-the-damn-liberals-style Musk.
Elon Musk is not buying CNN
The rumor that Elon Musk is buying CNN comes from Musk's own X. A simple community note reading "this is not true" is included, so that's good. But Argentine President Javier Milei doesn't seem to have read the note, since he mentioned the rumor in front of the Argentine Chamber of Commerce on Nov. 7. and the largest Argentinian newspaper reported on it as well.
Elon Musk did not "storm a small town" to help a bullied teenager
This fake video from YouTube channel The Crow has been viewed 760,000 times. It gives an origin story to Fake-News Elon. When Alex, a promising student at "Tesla STEM high school" is bullied for his interest in rockets, Elon shows up at the school to tell Alex that he too was bullied as a teen. This inspires Alex to "present his work at a regional science fair," where he won first prize, a scholarship to a top-tier engineering student, and an internship at Tesla!
More things Elon Musk did not do
Elon Musk did not buy McDonalds, ABC, or Disney World. Elon Musk did not ban Stephen King from X, not has he developed robots to carry human babies.
So why all the Musk-related fake news?
It's tempting to think that the downpour of Musk fan fiction is Elon using bots to improve his image among the nation's mouth-breathers (it's not like the guy's a stranger to spreading misinformation) but I think it's more basic than that. The deluge of fake news about Elon Musk probably comes down to engagement. For cultural reasons beyond easy understanding, enough of the dumbest people you went to high school with want fake news about Elon Musk to support a cottage of industry of AI sites to churn it out.
But they don't want just any stories about Elon Musk. Tthe most popular fake-Musk news stories aren't the ones where he visits vengeance on cultural enemies like Jimmy Kimmel; they're the ones where a billionaire with a heart of gold sweeps in to save the day and change a waitress's life at Waffle House (Musk always eats at Waffle House) or reunite a lost child with their mother. That one has over 1.4 million views on YouTube alone. The people want a hero, and for reasons that resist logic, they've chosen Elon fucking Musk to fill the role.
Despite starting with Elon Musk riding a public bus, a dead giveaway that it's fake, people (or AI agents anyway) on YouTube seem to be swallowing it. Highly upvoted comments include, "We love our cute Elon sir. He is friend of all children," and "Wow, sir Elon, you are the ANGEL GABRIEL who has brought good news to Maddies' World!! Thax." Thax indeed.
Elon Musk: troubling Messiah
My favorite subset of fake Musk stories are the ones that seem designed to paper over the difference in values between the actual Elon Musk and the kinds of people who consume fake media.
Elon is a bit of tough sell to the "your MAGA aunt on Facebook" crowd. No matter what you think of him, he's a weird guy. He's said publicly he's a "cultural Christian" but is wishy-washy about whether he believes in God. He's had 12 children with three different women and he gives them names like Techno Mechanicus. He's not the middle-American family man the people want. But that's OK, because you can just whip up some AI videos to make Elon into whatever you like. Like this story about Musk attending church in Las Vegas (ha!) and witnessing a miracle that caused him to convert to Christianity. Not "cultural Christianity," either; the real thing. At least one of Musk's children doesn't speak to him and his ex-partners have not been kind about his interest in parenting. But that's cool, because here's a video about how Elon Musk is a great parent and all of his many children love him very much.
The Musk virus infects us all
It's not just right-wing types that traffic in Musk-glurge: Left-wing dummies have their own version of Musk to read about. Dark Musk isn't helping handicapped dogs cross the street; he's using his vast network of satellites to rig the 2024 election. He's paying for Donald Trump's extravagant inauguration bash. He's fat, too—a corpulent, James-Bond-level super-villain who's bringing down the United States.