Did Elon Musk publicly announce plans to "officially" buy McDonald's in November 2024? No, that's not true: As of this publication, there is no record of Musk having formally announced plans to buy the food company, and McDonald's has not reported such a purchase. Furthermore, an online AI detector tool found that images published in the post that depicted Musk in or near McDonald's restaurants showed "substantial evidence of manipulation."
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on November 5, 2024. Above three images of Musk surrounded by the McDonald's logo, the caption opened:
Elon Musk: "i am officially buying McDonalds"
Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Twitter, has just made an announcement that nobody saw coming: he is officially buying McDonald's.
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken Wed Nov 13 14:54:00 2024 UTC)
The post did not give information to support this claim, such as when or where Musk supposedly announced his plans, nor did the post include a link to any statement supporting the claim.
In April 2022, Musk tweeted (archived here) that he was "going to buy McDonald's and fix all of the ice cream machines." However, in the caption of this same tweet, he stated, "Listen, I can't do miracles ok," implying that the claim in the post was a joke.
Lead Stories ran the three images in the post through the artificial intelligence detection tool on TrueMedia.org, a self-described deepfake detector website. TrueMedia determined (archived here) that the photos show "substantial evidence of manipulation" and were likely generated using AI.
A Google News search (archived here) using keywords from this claim returned several results involving Musk and McDonald's, including a time when Musk "offered to eat a happy meal on television" (archived here). However, none of these reports supported Musk's supposed announcement of buying McDonald's.
An advanced search (archived here) of the X platform for the quote "I am officially buying McDonald's, also did not produce results to substantiate the claim that those were Musk's words.
Lead Stories completed a Google reverse image search (archived here) and could not locate the original publication of the images. However, these images have been shared across several social media platforms.
A search of the McDonald's corporate website produced no results that that would confirm Musk "officially buying McDonald's."
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken Wed Nov 13 19:00:00 2024 UTC)
At the time this was written, PolitiFact had reviewed the same claim.
Lead Stories contacted McDonald's corporation for a statement verifying the validity of this claim. If a response is received, this fact check will be updated.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks mentioning McDonald's and Elon Musk can be read here and here.
