Did Elon Musk say in a post on X that DOGE had uncovered "tens of millions of dollars spent on golf by a single government official"? No, that's not true: What appeared to be screenshots of a March 16, 2025, post by Musk to that effect were in fact digital fabrications. The fake post appeared to be a satirical allusion to President Donald Trump's penchant for golf.
The fake post appeared in an April 2, 2025, post on Threads (archived here). The caption that accompanied it was "I wonder who!", a likely reference to Trump. The fake Musk X post itself bore the date "3/16/25" and read as follows:
Unbelievable. The DOGE team has discovered TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS spent on GOLF by a SINGLE GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL. Stay tuned for when we figure out who it is.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot)
Lead Stories searched for the phrase "millions of dollars spent on golf" (archived here) on Musk's X account and did not find any matching posts.
A Google search for the same phrase (archived here) , limited to links containing "x.com/username" using the "site:" search operator returned no results, indicating Google didn't recently index such a post.
Furthermore, all screenshots of the supposed post showed exactly the same view count and background. If the post had been real, it's very likely it would have been captured by different users at different points in time, which would have resulted in a variety of screenshots showing different view counts and/or layouts (i.e. night vs. day mode, mobile vs. web interface, and so on).
