Did Oprah Winfrey announce she is ending her talk show and moving to Italy, saying "I can't live in the U.S. for the next four years and breathe the same air as Elon Musk" as online article claimed? No, that's not true: There is no evidence Winfrey made any such statment, and the "Oprah Winfrey Show" ended in 2011. An AI detection tool found the text of the story was written by AI.
The claim originated in an article (archived here) published by Batmalite Media on February 6, 2025, titled "Oprah Winfrey Decides to End Legendary Show, Plans to Move to Italy: 'I CAN'T LIVE IN THE US FOR THE NEXT 4 YEARS AND BREATH THE SAME AIR AS ELON MUSK.'" The article began:
In a stunning turn of events, media mogul Oprah Winfrey has announced her decision to end her legendary talk show and relocate to Italy, citing an irreconcilable disdain for tech billionaire Elon Musk. The revelation has sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry and beyond, leaving fans and critics alike speculating about her motivations and future plans.
This is what the article looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: screenshot of Batmalite Media article taken by Lead Stories on February 13, 2025)
The Oprah Winfrey show ran from 1986 to 2011 (archived here), meaning it ended over a decade ago, well before Elon Musk got into politics.
A Google search (archived here) for the words "Oprah Winfrey" + "Italy" + "Elon Musk" did not turn up any interviews with a leading news magazine, as described in the claim. It did, however, turn up a number of reposts on Facebook, Threads and X accounts that were recently created or only recently posted on.
At first glance, Batmalite Media appears to be a news entertainment and lifestyle site. But a closer look shows it follows a formulaic structure often used in clickbait article headlines: a person, company or group that is liked or disliked by the intended audience for political or cultural reasons gets (fictionally) punished or rewarded in some way, for example by losing or gaining a contract, job, endorsement, business deal, award or title.
The website posts dozens of articles per day, about a variety of seemingly random topics, indicating it may be part of a content farm or spam network.
The site was named Batmalite Media, implying it was a generic news website instead of a name that would identify it as publication focused on humor, parody or satire.
According to AI detection tool Quillbot, the text of the article was likely 100% written using AI.
(Source: screenshot of quillbot.com results taken by Lead Stories on February 13, 2025)
Content on the site frequently swaps out letters from the Roman alphabet for Cyrillic letters that visually look roughly identical, a technique frequently used to obfuscate plagiarism or evade moderation.
