Do viral posts prove that the tech billionaire decided to celebrate American ice skater Alysa Liu's gold medal at the 2025 women's championship by giving her a Tesla? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found no credible reports confirming it. Musk's and Liu's accounts on social media don't offer any support for the claim, either.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on May 9, 2025. It opened:
Elon Musk decides to gift Alysa Liu a Tesla after she becomes the first American woman in 19 years to win the world figure skating championship. Detail in The Comments 🚨👇
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot by Lead Stories)
In late March 2025, Alysa Liu won (archived here) the women's figure skating world championship. However, Lead Stories found no evidence supporting the claim about a Tesla gift.
In the comment section, the same account on Facebook shared a link to a blog post published on April 9, 2025. Yet, it was still only one paragraph long and did not offer any details about the circumstances under which the tech billionaire supposedly decided to give Liu a car manufactured by his company.
A search on Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) across reports published in 2025 did not credible dispatches confirming what was shared on social media.
Lead Stories manually reviewed the athlete's account on Instagram, but found no mentions of the supposed gift.
A Google search for the keywords seen here (archived here) and here (archived here) across Musk's account on X did not provide any evidence of the supposed gift -- the results only showed his self-description as being "bad" at this particular sport.
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks about sports are here.
