Did tech billionaire Elon Musk publish a post in defense of insurance companies, saying that those corporations can act "ruthlessly" because of their "duty to shareholders to maximize profits"? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found no record of the purported post on Musk's X account. The fake screenshot of the entry appears to have originated from a meme website.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on December 9, 2024. It said:
All I see is a billionaire pleading for his life.
What looked like a screenshot of Elon Musk's account on X said:
It's disgusting how everyone is turning this guy intosome kind of folk hero. Insurance companies, likeany company, have a duty to shareholders tomaximize profits, no matter how ruthlessly. Theradical left espousing otherwise needs to grow thehell up.
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Tue Dec 10 14:39:03 2024 UTC)
The "screenshot" of the supposed post showed the publication date: December 7, 2024. However, neither a manual review of Musk's activity on X (archived here) nor a manual review of his posts sorted by date by Google (archived here) showed a match.
A review of archived versions of his account on Archive.Today didn't show any traces of the supposed entry.
The wording of the post doesn't appear to have been indexed by Google on the day of the purported publication (archived here).
A TinEye reverse image search showed that the "screenshot" in question appeared on the internet only on December 8, 2024. It was originally uploaded to a meme website (archived here).
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) didn't produce a single news report confirming that Musk ever posted what the claim attributed to him.
One remarkable thing about the purported screenshot was that the time of the publication didn't show the AM/PM distinction, unlike many other posts on Musk's real account. TrueMedia, which is a nonprofit AI detection tool, showed (archived here) some signs that could be pointing to "substantial evidence" of digital manipulation of the post.
Lead Stories reached out for comments to Tesla and SpaceX communications teams, which are Musk's other businesses. If we receive a response, this fact check will be updated as appropriate.
