Did Tesla CEO Elon Musk invest $1 billion into actors Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg's "new un-woke production studio"? No, that's not true: We could not find any evidence to corroborate this claim. Lead Stories debunked a similar claim about a supposed Gibson-Walberg "non-woke film production studio" earlier in 2024. The original claim about the purported studio came from a satirical website and is not based in reality.
The claim appeared in a post on Threads (archived here) on June 3, 2024. The graphic read:
Breaking: Elon Musk Invests $1 Billion in Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg's New Un-Woke Production Studio
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Tue Jun 4 14:54:27 2024 UTC)
Smaller text in the lower right-hand corner claims that the full story is in the comments, but Lead Stories did not find any further details or links there at the time of writing. The Threads post did not cite any sourcing for the claim.
Lead Stories debunked an almost identical claim to this one in April 2024. The Lead Stories article pointed out the claim's headline and image, originally found on the website esspots.com, were also posted on a satirical website's Facebook page, SpaceX Fanclub. SpaceX Fanclub's website Intro reads:
We post SATIRE, nothing on this page is real.
A search on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Wahlberg's Instagram and Threads (archived here) for an announcement from Musk about his alleged investment did not yield any results that would back up the claim. At the time of writing, neither Musk or Gibson has a verified Instagram account.
Lead Stories did a search using keywords on the Google News archive of thousands of reliable information sites, visible here, which found no credible documents or reporting to corroborate the claim (archived here).
At the time this was written, Snopes had reviewed the same claim.
More Lead Stories articles on Elon Musk are here. Other Lead Stories fact checks on Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg are here and here, respectively.
