Did Elon Musk spend $40 million on Super Bowl ads that listed all the corruption the Department of Government Efficiency has found so far? No, that's not true: There was no credible evidence supporting the assertion that Musk bought five 30-second ads for the February 9, 2025, Super Bowl about the "corruptions DOGE has found so far." No ads aired during the Super Bowl about DOGE or government corruption. A list of all the ads publicly available on the internet shows that none of them were about DOGE.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on February 8, 2025. It said:
Elon Musk spent 40 million of his own money to buy 5, 30 second long commercial slots during Super Bowl where he's gonna list all the corruption DOGE has found so far.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Feb 10 21:52:58 2025 UTC)
There is no proof given in the post that Musk bought ads during the Super Bowl to showcase the corruption DOGE had uncovered in 2025.
A list of all the commercials that aired during the 2025 Super Bowl on February 9, 2025, did not include any about DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump created.
USA Today (archived here) ranked all the Super Bowl 2025 ads, and none were about DOGE, government "corruption" or Musk.
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 one that mentioned Musk or DOGE.
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 DOGE.
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.
A February 5, 2025, tweet (archived here) claimed that Musk had offered to spend the money for the Super Bowl commercials but did not offer any proof or evidence of the offer:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Feb 10 21:56:11 2025 UTC)
Had Musk spent the $40 million on Super Bowl commercials, or had he offered to do so before the game, that would have been national news. A search of Google for keywords "Elon Musk spent $40 million of his own money to buy commercial slots Super Bowl" found no credible news reports.
The image used in the post shows Musk on the day he bought Twitter, toasting his purchase, as the Daily Mail reported with the published photo (archived here).
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Other Lead Stories fact checks regarding Elon Musk can be found here.
