Was Elon Musk reported in March 2025 to be in talks to buy the Cincinnati Bengals for $15 billion and had reports "surfaced" that Bengals President Mike Brown was considering the offer? No, that's not true: The content of the article making such claims was found to be made up by ai and provided no links, citations or witnesses corroborating such talks were underway. Despite close attention to the Bengals and Musk by Cincinnati media, no such talks had been reported there or by other evidence-based news sites.
The claim appeared a March 27, 2025 article (archived here) on the amdailynews.com site under the title "BREAKING NEWS". It opened:
Elon Musk is reportedly in talks to buy Cincinnati Bengals for $15 billion
At the time of writing, this is how the amdailynews webpage appeared:
(Source: amdailynews.com screenshot by Lead Stories)
The amdaily news article claims:
reports have surfaced that Elon Musk is in negotiations to purchase the Cincinnati Bengals for an astronomical $15 billion. The news has sent shockwaves through the NFL world, leaving fans and analysts wondering what this potential takeover could mean for the franchise. With current owner Mike Brown reportedly considering the offer, speculation is running wild about the future of the Bengals.
No such reports have surfaced in Cincinnati, a city with multiple newsrooms with sports reporters assigned to cover the Bengals.
Lead Stories searched the website of The Cincinnati Enquirer, (archived here) finding close attention to Musk, but no reports "surfaced" about Musk buying the Bengals:
(Source: Cincinnati Enquirer/Cincinnati.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
Similarly, Lead Stories searched the website for Cincinnati's top-rated television newscast, WKRC (archived here) and found no reports about a Musk purchase of the Bengals:
(Source: WKRC.com screenshot taken by Lead Stories)
The amdailynews.com report cites, as evidence of his interest in an NFL team, that Musk had tweeted:
"If you want to build a winning team, you need innovation. The future of the NFL is about to change."
Using Google Search, Lead Stories found no instance (archived here) of Musk making that statement:
(Source: Google.com screenshot taken by Lead Stories)
The text of the article, submitted to ai detectors, was assessed to be ai-generated, not written by a human.
One detector, gptzero.me, declared high certainty the contents of the article were ai-generated:
(Source: GPTZero screenshot taken by Lead Stories.)
Another ai detector, QuillBot, declared that 59% of the text in the article was ai-generated.
Lead Stories reached out to the NFL, the Bengals and to Musk, via the Tesla press office and we will update this report, as appropriate, when they reply.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks about Musk can be found here.
