Did tech billionaire Elon Musk "step in" to take care of an infant left behind by its parents? No, that's not true: The viral rumor originated from AI generated images coupled with AI generated text. As of April 15, 2025, no credible media outlet reported the purported event.
The claim reappeared a post (archived here) published on Facebook on April 12, 2025. It opened:
A newborn baby was abandoned just five hours ago. In the face of this heartbreaking situation, Elon Musk has stepped in to become her guardian, committing to covering all expenses for her upbringing.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot by Lead Stories)
The rather high-resolution first image purporting to have captured Musk holding the baby in what appeared to be a hospital setting showed strangely blurry, unusually shaped hands of the baby with seemingly conjoined multiple fingers:
(Source: InVid screenshot by Lead Stories)
Unsurprisingly, two online detectors -- Hive Moderation and InVid (archived here) -- pointed to the presence of generative AI in the image:
(Source: Hive Moderation screenshot by Lead Stories)
(Source: InVid screenshot by Lead Stories)
Another picture from the triptych showed Musk, but the ear was not formed correctly. As seen in the composite image below, a comparison between the viral image and a photograph taken by the AP and published by Politico in April 2025 (archived here) revealed that the shapes of the recess at the top of the ear and the earlobe didn't match:
(Sources: Facebook and Politico screenshots by Lead Stories; composite image by Lead Stories)
The claim reviewed in this article has been circulating on social media at least since March 31, 2025 (archived here) when it was posted by a page of a "Fashion Model · Gaming video creator" managed by multiple admins from Vietnam and Indonesia, as its transparency tab specified. Remarkably, at the time, the caption also declared that the baby was abandoned "just five hours ago".
According to GPTZero and Quillbot, the initial description was generated by AI:
(Source: Quillbot screenshot by Lead Stories)
(Source: GPTZero screenshot by Lead Stories)
Simultaneously, articles about the purported "news" popped up on obscure, clickbait websites that lacked any form of disclosure about the entities behind them. Those examples can be seen here and here.
A search for the keywords seen here (archived here) across articles indexed by Google News for the period between March 31, 2025, and the time this fact check was written didn't lead to any credible reporting corroborating the online rumor about Musk adopting an abandoned baby.
The same claim was previously reviewed by Snopes.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Elon Musk are here.
