Did Elon Musk save the life of 7-year-old Lily Thompson by paying her medical bills and arranging for a Neuralink chip to be implanted into her brain in March 2025? No, that's not true: There are no "local news reports" of a child by that name "battling a rare neurological disorder," as claimed in a blog post. The post said Musk saw the story on March 22, 2025 and immediately stepped in to fund the girl's surgery and arrange for a Neuralink chip implantation. AI detectors confirmed it was highly likely that the text and related images were generated by artificial intelligence tools.
The claim originated in an article (archived here) published by news.citestesitu.com on March 23, 2025, under the title "A Little Girl's Miracle: Elon Musk Funds Surgery and Neuralink Chip to Save a Life". It opened:
Elon Musk, the billionaire trailblazer of Tesla and SpaceX, has touched hearts worldwide by stepping in to save a young girl's life, covering all her medical expenses and funding a groundbreaking Neuralink chip implantation. The story unfolded on March 22, 2025, when Musk learned of 7-year-old Lily Thompson, a girl battling a rare neurological disorder that left her unable to walk, speak, or even breathe without assistance. Facing astronomical costs and fading hope, Lily's family received an unexpected lifeline when Musk personally pledged to cover every penny of her care, including a pioneering surgery that could restore her chance at a normal childhood.
This is what the article looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: Screenshot from https://news.citestesitu.com on Thu Mar 27, 2025 at 18:59:36)
A review of the news.citestesitu.com website reveals the WordPress blog was created in June 2024. In the first several months it only posted movie trailers. The blog has published dozens of posts in recent months making obviously false claims about accomplishments of Elon Musk.
Lead Stories conducted a Google search on March 27, 2025, for "Lily Thompson" to determine if there had been any reporting or social posts about a child battling illness. The only results were fact checks warning readers away from the claim.
When we ran the text of the article through three AI detection tools, each indicated the story was likely written by artificial intelligence. The tool app.gptzero.me concluded "We are highly confident this text was AI generated."
(Source: Screenshot from https://app.gptzero.me/ on Thu Mar 27, 2025 at 19:19:23)
The Quillbot.com and Scribbr AI detectors both rated it as 62 percent AI generated text.
The claim that Musk saved Lily Thompson's life with his quick financial intervention is especially amazing because of the speed of his actions. Although he purportedly only learned about the child's plight on March 22, she already had the life-saving Neurolink implantation by the next day when the post was published online.
Neuralink chips are not yet approved for general use. Human trials were approved by the FDA in 2023.
The blog post's claim was repeated in social media posts, including this one on Facebook (archived here.)
(Source: Screenshot from Facebook on Thu Mar 27, 2025 at 20:43:16)
While the Hive AI detection tool concluded the image of the child was likely real, it found the image of Musk was highly likely to be AI generated.
