Did Elon Musk tweet "The USA needs to hold an election. Trump would lose by a landslide." on March 7, 2025? No, that's not true: The post in question does not appear on Musk's X account and it was not indexed by Google. A viral screenshot that appears to show such a post bears signs of digital manipulation.
An example of the screenshot appeared in a post on X (archived here) published on March 7, 2025, along with the comment:
Did I miss something?👁👁
This is what the alleged screenshot looked like:
(Image source: image downloaded from x.com by Lead Stories on March 8, 2025 at 10:06:01 UTC)
Lead Stories searched for the phrase "The USA needs to hold an election" (archived here) on the X account of Elon Musk and did not find any matching posts.
A Google search for the phrase "The USA needs to hold an election" limited to links containing x.com/elonmusk (archived here) using the "site:" search operator returned no results, indicating Google didn't recently index such a post.
All screenshots of the supposed post showed exactly the same view count and background. If the post had been real the expectation would be that there were more screenshots circulating showing different view counts and/or layouts (night vs. day mode, mobile vs. web interface...), especially given the very high view count.
According to image forensics tool InVID WeVerify the areas in the image with Musk's username, avatar, the date/time and view count had compression artifacts that indicated they likely originated from a different JPEG image.
(Source: screenshot of InVID forensics results taken by Lead Stories on March 8, 2025 at 10:19:58 UTC)
The faked screenshot was likely meant as a parody of this tweet from Musk:
Ukraine needs to hold an election.
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2025
Zelensky would lose by a landslide. https://t.co/P8e2NFOqYs
