Did CNBC publish a story with a headline that read "JUST IN: Luigi Mangione Found Dead In Jail Cell"? No, that's not true: The story did not appear on CNBC's website at the time of writing and a screenshot showing such a headline appears to have been fabricated. No such CNBC story had been indexed by Google either.
The headline appeared in an image that looked like a screenshot of a CNBC article in several posts on X for example this one (archived here) published on February 10, 2025 and captioned :
SO THEY EPSTEINED LUIGI TOO NOW
This is what the image looked like:
(Source: screenshot from x.com taken by Lead Stories on February 10, 2025 at 00:37:59 UTC)
In a later post (archived here), the user posted another screenshot that showed the URL https://cnbcnews.us/luigi-mangione-just-found-dead-in-jail-cell-following-arrest-for-ceo-murder in it, which lead to a 404 error page and for which only that error page was archived by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
However, CNBC's website is at www.cnbc.com, not at cnbcnews.us, which is a domain name registered only in November of 2024 by a "Charles Rodriguez" from Florida according to public WHOIS data (archived here).
Lead Stories searched for the exact phrase "Luigi Mangione Found Dead In Jail Cell" on Google in combination with "site:cnbc.com" (the "site:" operator) and no matching results were returned (archived here).
A search for "Luigi Mangione" AND "dead" AND "cell" on Google News (archived here) brought up no reports from February 9, 2025 or after
All screenshots of the supposed CNBC article Lead Stories found on social media were exactly the same height and width and showed the same "Trending Now" stories in the sidebar, including one mentioning the toppling of the French government that was published on December 4, 2024 (archived here) . If the screenshots had been of a real article the expectation would be that there were more different screenshots circulating showing different layouts (night vs. day mode, mobile vs. web interface...) and different trending stories.
