Does a real photo show President Donald Trump, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and others toasting at a black-tie event? No, that's not true: The image is AI-generated, according to analysis from online detection tools. Searches of the image did not generate credible results.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the @sarrah_bellus account on X on Sept. 25, 2026. It read:
Next time you're at the gas station or struggling to put food on the table....remember this picture!!!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @sarrah_bellus on X.)
The image allegedly shows the following individuals:
Seated (front row, left to right): Chinese President Xi Jinping; U.S. President Donald Trump; Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla; and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
Standing (back row, left to right): Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon; Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google; Tim Cook, executive chairman of Apple; Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies; Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; and Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi.
Although the photo is fake, the people in the image were on the expected guest list of a Sept. 24, 2026, state dinner (archived here) at the White House, honoring Xi.
Image analysis
Lead Stories ran the image through OpenAI's tool to verify whether it was OpenAI-generated (archived here). The tool detected a SynthID (archived here) consistent with the image being generated using OpenAI:
(Image source: OpenAI.)
The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool (archived here) concluded that the image was 99.9% "Likely to be AI-Generated Image":
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Searches for the image
A search of Google Images for the image only generated results from social media, not credible sources:
(Image source: Google Images.)
Searches on TinEye (archived here) and Yandex (archived here) did not generate any matching results.
