Did Elon Musk pay for an ad that aired during the Super Bowl that claimed the U.S. Agency for International Development spent $2 million on German llama racing and other nonsensical spending? No, that's not true: No ads aired during the Super Bowl from Elon Musk about outlandish things the agency was supposedly spending millions of dollars on, including llama racing, whiskey for foster parents in Singapore and Canadian maple syrup for Iraq. A list of all the Super Bowl ads publicly available on the internet showed that none of them were from Musk and none showed bizarre multimillion-dollar spending.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on Instagram on February 11, 2025, with a caption that said, "5 things from Elon's Super Bowl ad." It opened with an unidentified person in the video saying:
For those that did not see Elon's Super Bowl ad, here are five things that were shown that were funded through USAID
This is what the post looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Wed Feb 12 20:11:23 2025 UTC)
The five things mentioned in the post weren't shown or discussed in a Super Bowl ad -- because there was no such ad.
The person in the video recited a list of things that supposedly were mentioned in a Super Bowl ad by "Elon," which presumably is a reference to Elon Musk. Musk is heading up DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, per instructions from President Donald Trump, as the New York Times reported. Musk has claimed in a series of public remarks that there is spending within USAID (archived here) -- the U.S. Agency for International Development -- that he believes is wasting money. On February 11, 2025, Musk admitted in the Oval Office that his recent claim of $50 million sent to Gaza for condoms by USAID was untrue, as CNN reported (archived here) and as Lead Stories had already debunked.
Here are the things that the person in the video claimed were discussed in "Elon's Super Bowl ad":
$2 million to German llama racing
$5 million to Chinese whiskey for foster parents in Singapore
$5,000 to gator wrestling in Australia
$9 million to Elizabeth Warren for her 2020 presidential race
$20 million for Canadian maple syrup sent to Iraq
Lead Stories previously debunked another claim on social media that said Musk spent $40 million on Super Bowl ads listing all the corruption that DOGE found.
The person in the video did not offer any evidence of an ad with those supposed outlandish expenditures and did not include clips from such an ad.
USA Today (archived here) ranked all the Super Bowl 2025 ads, and none were about llama racing, gator wrestling in Australia or whiskey for foster parents in Singapore.
Superbowl-ads.com (archived here) is a website that allows viewers to watch Super Bowl commercials. It included 66 videos of 2025 Super Bowl ads, none of which included any of the supposed USAID funding for the bizarre things in the video.
AdWeek (archived here), a weekly trade publication that covers advertising, listed 59 ads that aired during the 2025 Super Bowl. Again, none mentioned Musk or USAID or Canadian maple syrup being sent to Iraq, or any other purported spending mentioned in the video.
Lead Stories watched the entirety of the Super Bowl on February 9, 2025, and independently verified that no advertisement contained the content listed in the post at the center of this fact check.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks regarding Elon Musk can be found here.
