Did Elon Musk post on X that the MAGA movement would "succeed in all the ways Nazi Germany failed"? No, that's not true: A post supposedly from Musk stating those sentiments is fake. Searches of Musk's X account and archived versions of the account found nothing to confirm Musk posted such a statement.
A screenshot of the purported Musk post on X also appeared on X (archived here) on January 23, 2025. It showed a genuine photo of Musk with his arm extended during a speech held on Inauguration Day 2025.
The image was made to look as though Musk posted the following to X the same day:
What can I say? I got caught up in the moment. But it wasn't a 'seig heil.' Why would I pledge allegiance to a nation 80 years dead? Why would I lionize a subdued and failed state? MAGA is the future, and will, in fact, succeed in all the ways Nazi Germany failed to
This is how the post looked on X at the time of this writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken Thur Jan 23 07:59:35 2025 UTC)
As of January 23, 2025, Musk's purported post about Germany's failure does not appear on his X account.
Musk posted to his X profile dozens of times on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, yet not one of the posts shown on his profile at the time of this writing (archived here) showed a post with the "Germany failed" content.
An advanced search for the phrase "Nazi Germany failed to" across Musk's X profile also returned no results, as demonstrated by the screenshot below:
(Source: X screenshot taken Thu Jan 23 19:03:52 2025 UTC)
A keyword search for "succeed in all the ways Nazi Germany failed to" across X only returned duplications of the claim or other unrelated posts with similar wording. No posts supported the authenticity of Musk's supposed post.
Lead Stories tried to search archived versions of Musk's X profile saved on January 21, 2025, but these pages were inaccessible at the time of this publication.
A Google keyword search of the entire phrase did not return any record of the quote other than fact checks by Logically Facts and PolitiFact.
Lead Stories also conducted reverse image searches of the supposed screenshot on Google Lens (archived here), Yandex, and TinEye (archived here). Some of these searches returned posts and articles featuring the photo of Musk, but none that supported his supposed post on X.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims involving Elon Musk can be seen here.
