Did Elon Musk post on X that the U.S. overstepped its bounds "by helping to end apartheid" in his "home country," South Africa? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found no record of Musk sharing this statement on his verified X profile as of November 5, 2024. The news media have not reported the supposed statement even though it "showed" 38 million views.
The claim appeared in a post shared on Threads on November 4, 2024. The post featured what seemed to be a screenshot of a post shared on X. It supposedly read:
There sure is a lot of chatter about me being a foreign-born person having an outsized influence on US politics, so allow me to remind everyone of the United States overstepping its bounds by helping to end apartheid in my home country. Maybe we call it even?
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot Wed Nov 6 09:43:00 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories did an advanced search on X for the text of the supposed post (archived here). The search yielded no relevant results.
Similarly, a generic advanced search for "apartheid" returned no relevant responses from Musk's X profile (archived here).
A reverse image search showed that the supposed screenshot started circulating in early November 2024 on platforms like Reddit and Threads but had yet to be shared by reputable news websites and outlets.
For example, Lead Stories searched the Google News archive of thousands of reliable information sites, as shown here (archived here), and found no credible documents or reporting to confirm the claim.
Other fact checks on claims related to Elon Musk can be read here.
