Did basketball coach Dawn Staley reject a $10 million donation from Elon Musk in March 2025? No, that's not true: Neither Musk nor Staley made any public statement about any donation. An AI detector concluded that the text of the story, including bogus quotes, was high likely to have been generated using AI.
The story originated in a March 23, 2025 article (archived here) on the website btuatu.com. The story bore the headline:
"Dawn Staley Shocks the World by Rejecting Elon Musk's $10 Million Offer. She says 'Keep It and Spend It on Something That Actually Helps People!"
Here's how it appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Screenshot taken by Lead Stories on March 24 15:30:21 2025 UTC)
The story attributed two striking quotations to Musk and Staley. First, it claimed that Musk had posted on X:
Coach Staley is leading a movement in sports and it's important to support leadership that fights for equality and the empowerment of women. This $10 million is a token of my admiration and support for her vision.
At time of writing, Musk had tweeted no such thing. Lead Stories searched for instances of the phrase "Coach Staley" emanating from Musk's X account, by using the Google "site:x.com/elonmusk" operator. That search yielded no results (archived here).
Secondly, the story claimed that Staley, who is head coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks NCAA basketball team, had rejected the purported $10 million offer and told reporters:
I'm honored by the generosity, but I can't accept this. There are far more important causes that need that kind of financial attention, and we have a responsibility to direct our resources in ways that truly make a difference for those who need it most. If Elon Musk wants to make an impact, there are millions of people out there who could benefit from a financial push in areas like healthcare, education, and housing. That's where this money should go.
That quotation was also a fabrication. If Staley had indeed made such remarks to a group of reporters, those remarks would undoubtedly have formed the basis of several prominent news stories.
However, Lead Stories conducted a search of Google News on March 24, 2025, using the terms "Dawn Staley" and "Elon Musk," and that search yielded no relevant results (archived here).
In short, Musk did not wrote the X post, and Staley did not respond to it.
Lead Stories ran the text of the btuatu.com story through the Hive AI detector, which concluded that the story was highly likely to have been generated using AI:
