Did BBC News report that "Elon Musk is wasting everyone's time and money, and serves no real purpose"? No, that's not true: A search of the BBC News website on February 27, 2025, yielded no such report or headline. The broadcaster also did not post about the fake report on its social media accounts.
The claim appeared in a X post (archived here) published on X on February 27, 2025 which read: The BBC is correct. https://t.co/Y7hA8e59SN
The post contained what appeared to be a screenshot of a BBC News headline that read:
REPORT: Elon Musk is wasting everyone's time and money, and serves no real purpose
Users on social media saw this title, description and thumbnail:
Annie on Twitter
The BBC is correct. https://t.co/Y7hA8e59SN
On February 27, 2025, Lead Stories searched the BBC News website (archived here) for the phrase "Musk is wasting everyone's time." That search yielded no results:
(Source: BBC.com screenshot taken on Thur Feb 26 17:23:05 2025 UTC)
A Google search for the same phrase limited to links from the bbc.com domain, using the "site:" search operator, also returned no results, indicating Google didn't recently index such a post.
On February 27, 2025, Lead Stories also searched BBC News social media accounts for evidence of a report matching the headline in the fake screenshot. Those searches yielded no results on X (archived here) and no relevant results on Facebook. Using the Google "site:" search operator for instagram.com, we also found there were no relevant results on that platform.
