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Data Trick

Does a cropped screenshot of a Google Trends chart of search term usage prove Tesla owners were "scrambling to remove their anti Elon stickers" on June 5, 2025, the day Musk began to publicly feud with Donald Trump? No, that's not true: The screenshot is fake and does not show actual data. Looking the past seven days of data, June 5 wasn't an unusually busy day for "How to remove sticker from car."

The chart appeared in a June 5, 2025 X post on the @greg16676935420 account (archived here) which opened: "🚨BREAKING: Tesla owners are scrambling to remove their anti Elon stickers from their car now that he is feuding with Trump."

Here's what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:

(Source: X.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)

Lead Stories checked Google Trends for the phrase "How to remove sticker from car" for the past seven days in the United States and got decidedly different results that did show a slight bump but nothing like the exponential curve in the screenshot:

(Image source: screenshot of https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=US&q=How%20to%20remove%20sticker%20from%20car&hl=en)

A similar search with the custom time period set from May 29 to June 5 as seen in the screenshot did not produce the graph either:

(Image source: screenshot of https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2025-05-29%202025-06-05&geo=US&q=How%20to%20remove%20sticker%20from%20car&hl=en)

There's an easy test to learn if those general searches were mostly about Teslas: add the name and if they were Tesla-related, there should be little difference in the data. We did that and Google Trends reported that making the search particular to Tesla (or to "Musk sticker") resulted in too little data to graph in their system, compared to the more general phrase:

(Source: Google Trends screenshot by Lead Stories.)

When we ran the Google Trends search for "How to remove sticker from car" for the week leading up to the feud, it did show increasing interest on June 5, but when we looked at the same phrase for the last year and for the last 90 days, June 5 didn't stand out. On six days before the feud, interest was greater than during the feud:

(Source: Google Trends screenshots taken by Lead Stories and arranged into comparison graphic.)

Google cautions users against interpreting the trendlines as a measure of the absolute number of searches. It is not. The line only shows a normalized measure of the interest in that search term relative to other terms being searched and relative to the peak interest in the exact term being tested: "A line trending downward means that a search term's relative popularity is decreasing--not necessarily that the total number of searches for that term is decreasing, but that its popularity compared to other searches is shrinking."

Google training materials also note that the nearby list of "Related Queries" shows the terms most often searched for with the keywords you are testing. In this case, neither Musk, Tesla, nor Trump showed up as being searched at the same time. Instead, Google users were looking for ways to remove sticker residue, remove window stickers, remove vinyl stickers:

(Source: Trends.google.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)

For readers following the Musk and Trump relationship, Lead Stories has compiled a list of our prior fact checks here.

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