Did social media posts accurately cite the words of Elon Musk's mother, Maye, on having children? No, that's not true: The viral quote was a review a critic made of Maye Musk's remarks about having children, not a direct quote. Maye Musk did not mention her "son's factory workers" while discussing the topic on X and Fox News in December 2024.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on December 16, 2024. It said:
'The poor should have kids so my son's factories have workers.' -Maye Musk (Elon Musk's mother)
She said that quiet part out loud.
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Fri Dec 20 16:18:44 2024 UTC)
The post implied that the quote accurately cited Maye Musk's words, but that was not the case.
On December 5, 2024, she wrote (archived here) on X in response to one of her son's posts:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Dec 20 18:52:09 2024 UTC)
On December 15, 2024, Maye Musk discussed the same topic on Fox News (archived here). At the 2:49 mark, she said:
When I had my children, we were in a two-bedroom, small apartment, apartment overlooking a garage. And then, the next year, by the second child, we had an apartment with a view. And then by the third child, we could get a two-bedroom house. And you just, you know, as you move on, you start doing better and better. But people ... you know, you don't have to go to the movies. You don't have to go out for dinner. You can just spend time with your, the most wonderful gifts you can ever have, children.
The host asked her:
You didn't feel like you were sacrificed?
To that, Maye Musk replied:
Never. It didn't occur to me. It seems to be a popular term, but it didn't occur to me.
Later on the same day, an account on X reposted (archived here) a clip from her interview on Fox News with a comment containing quotation marks:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Dec 20 19:06:06 2024 UTC)
Paired with an actual video quote, the account appeared to have expressed an opinion on Maye Musk's words in a larger context incorporating, among other things, her son's post (archived here), the post he replied to (archived here) and the post published in the same thread on X earlier (archived here) -- all before Musk's mother joined the conversation. Those entries, however, did not specifically discuss "factory workers," either.
Furthermore, unlike the post reviewed in this article, the initial comment on the interview seen in the screenshot above didn't claim that Maye Musk "said that quiet part out loud."
Later, the textual comment on the Fox News interview from the same screenshot above started to circulate on social media without the video fragment, thus, creating a misleading impression that what was put in the quotation marks were the actual words of Maye Musk.
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) led to a single result: a Snopes fact check that reviewed the same claim.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims mentioning Elon Musk can be found here.
