Did Elon Musk tweet that the "world would not be able to function" without CEOs after the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare Group? No, that's not true: The tweet is fake. Searches of Musk's X account and archived versions of it show the post was fabricated.
A screenshot of the purported X post (archived here) appeared on Threads on December 5, 2024. It looked like a post from Musk and read:
It has been brought to my attention that some Americans are actually cheering for the gunman who killed UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, and that they are saying this is a warning to all CEOs. What these people fail to understand is that without CEOs, the world would not be able to function, and as CEOs, we are responsible for the delicate balancing act of generating profits for shareholders while also ensuring that shareholders are able to maintain their own personal wealth even in spite of the typical corporate laziness and greed of middle-management and their staff. America will be destitute without us. #DOGE
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken Fri Dec 6 07:48:31 2024 UTC)
As of December 6, 2024, Musk's alleged post about CEOs does not appear on his X account, as shown by the results of this search (archived here).
Searches of archived versions of his account, from December 4, 2024, and December 5, 2024, also do not turn up the purported tweet.
Thompson was shot (archived here) and killed early on December 4, 2024, by a gunman outside a hotel in New York City.
As further evidence that the X post is fake, the image in the post on Threads includes Musk's old profile picture. He swapped out the image of him wearing a dark hat around mid-November 2024, as seen in these two archived pages from Musk's actual X account.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims involving Elon Musk can be seen here.
