Fake Claims of Elon Musk’s Latest Acquisitions
Plus: No, Sephora Didn’t Donate to Trump’s Campaign; Alex Jones’ Post-Infowars Plans
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Today:
AI fuels viral frenzy over Elon Musk’s fake business empire
Making it up: Social media users falsely claim Sephora donated to Trump campaign
Ads for Adobe, Dell, GoDaddy, Max, and others fund false claim that Cleveland Clinic issued a warning about COVID-19 vaccine deaths
No kidding: Alex Jones pivots to new site after The Onion acquires Infowars
And More …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
1. Musk Bought McDonald’s and CNN? AI Fuels Fake Rumors of His Latest Acquisitions
By Natalie Adams and Sofia Rubinson
Elon Musk has his hands in many industries — from the social media platform X to Tesla’s electric vehicles and SpaceX’s space exploration. But if you get news from social media, you’ve likely come across claims that Musk is buying up many more companies.
What happened: AI content farms are falsely claiming that Musk recently bought companies including CNN, McDonald’s, Ford, Disney, and Walmart. Their claims have been repeated by others including the president of Argentina.
Content farms are entities that generate large volumes of low-quality content, typically to attract views and ad revenue. These accounts often use AI to quickly produce content, NewsGuard has previously reported.
The content farms are capitalizing on the heightened interest in Musk as he emerges as a key confidante to President-elect Donald Trump.
A closer look: Many posts on these sites rely on AI to either narrate videos or produce compelling images to accompany the false claims about Musk.
Conspiracy TikTok account @secrets.intheice, a content farm that uses AI-generated voiceovers to narrate videos, issued an Oct. 28 post that stated, “Musk has officially announced, ‘I am officially buying McDonald’s.’” The video garnered 350,000 views and 8,800 likes.
YouTube content farm @VoyagerSpace, which has 500,000 subscribers and often posts fabricated videos, published a Nov. 3 video with an AI-generated narration that states, “Elon Musk has just announced his decision to buy Walmart.”
Facebook users, including Ghanian Okus Isaac Agbodzi, posted an AI-generated image on Nov. 7 of Musk shaking hands with Ford CEO Jim Farley alongside the caption, “Elon Musk surprises the world with Ford acquisition.”
Last week, 404Media.co (NewsGuard Trust Score: 87.5/100) reported that AI images of fake Musk inventions, from affordable tiny homes to UFO fighter jets, were going viral on Facebook.
Actually: There are no credible reports of any of these Musk purchases.
Fact-checking organizations including PolitiFact (Trust Score: 100/100), Snopes (Trust Score: 100/100), and VerifyThis (Trust Score: 100/100) have all debunked these claims.
Beyond the content farms: The false claim that Musk bought CNN has gained traction in Argentina.
Argentine President Javier Milei said in a Nov. 7 speech to the Argentine Chamber of Commerce: “You're going to see that what Donald Trump does will be talked about a little better, because today Elon Musk bought that filthy ‘woke’ bastion that was CNN, which means that now we're not only going to have freedom in X, but we're also going to have a network that's not so socialist, so left-wing.”
Argentina’s largest newspaper, Clarín, quoted Milei’s speech in a Nov. 7 article. And an X post from the outlet’s account advancing the claim received 134,000 views and 300 likes.
Pro-Trump X account @DiligentDenizen said in a Nov. 7 post, “BREAKING- Clarin is reporting that ELON MUSK HAS BOUGHT CNN,” with a photo of Clarín’s X post. The post garnered 465,000 views and 2,000 likes.
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2. All Made Up: No, Sephora Didn’t Donate to Trump’s Campaign
What happened: Both liberal and conservative social media users are falsely claiming that cosmetics company Sephora donated to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
A closer look: The claim appears to have originated in a Nov. 10 TikTok video posted by liberal influencer @karessmarie4, who asserted that Sephora, among other businesses, donated to the Trump campaign.
“Let’s see who did and did not make donations to the Trump campaign… Sephora BIG BIG BIG DONATIONS!! I HOPE we all understand the assignment for this Christmas season!” @karessmarie4 wrote in the video, which garnered 14 million views and 277,000 likes.
While liberal users advanced the false claim to call for a boycott of Sephora, pro-Trump users cited the fake campaign contribution as a reason to buy products from the cosmetics company.
In a Nov. 11 TikTok video, pro-Trump user @ziondetox included Sephora on a list of companies that purportedly donated to Trump. The post, which accumulated 416,200 views and 10,100 likes, stated: “Let’s support these stores!”
Actually: Neither Sephora nor its parent company, multinational luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign, nor could any corporation legally donate directly to a campaign (though their executives could, and the company could support a pro-Trump independent PAC, neither of which appears to have happened).
A Sephora spokesperson told CBS News (Trust Score: 90/100) in November 2024 that the company “does not make corporate donations to political candidates.”
OpenSecrets (Trust Score: 100/100), a nonprofit that tracks contributions to U.S. political campaigns, does not show any record of Sephora or LVMH making PAC donations in support of either Kamala Harris or Trump.
People associated with LVMH or Sephora — a category that includes employees, owners, and their family members — personally donated $318 to Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to OpenSecrets.
Campaign finance records also show that people associated with LVMH or Sephora donated $35,000 to the Harris campaign.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. Brand Victims of the Week: Ads for Adobe, Dell, GoDaddy, Max, and Others Fund False Claim that the Cleveland Clinic Issued a Warning About COVID-19 Vaccine Deaths
In this Reality Check feature, NewsGuard identifies global brands that support the spread of misinformation by unintentionally funneling programmatic advertising dollars to sites that repeatedly peddle false claims. Unless advertisers use inclusion or exclusion lists to place their programmatic ads, these ads will appear on websites regardless of their trustworthiness.
This week: A NewsGuard analyst based in the U.S. was shown programmatic ads for Adobe, Dell, GoDaddy, Max, 1-800 Flowers, Sling, and Under Armour on an article published by SlayNews.com (Trust Score: 0/100). SlayNews.com is an anonymously-run website that has repeatedly advanced false claims about health and vaccines. The Nov. 10, 2024, article claimed that the Cleveland Clinic warned of “an incoming wave of deaths that will kill off huge numbers of people who received Covid mRNA ‘vaccines.’” A spokesperson for the Cleveland Clinic told NewsGuard in a November 2024 email: “Recent claims suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine will lead to myocarditis and mass deaths are false and lack any scientific basis.”
Representatives for Adobe, Dell, GoDaddy, Max, 1-800 Flowers, Sling, and Under Armour did not immediately respond to NewsGuard’s emailed requests for comment.
(Disclosure: NewsGuard is among the companies that license data that would help advertisers only advertise on reliable, brand suitable news sites.)
If you see something, say something
If you see or hear something that you think may be provably false, please alert NewsGuard via realitycheck@newsguardtech.com and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of it. Note: Tips should not include content that you simply disagree with, however strongly.
4. Alex Jones Vows, ‘That Which Does Not Kill Us Only Makes Us Stronger’
By Sam Howard
In the wake of The Onion’s planned purchase of his Infowars assets in a bankruptcy sale, Alex Jones already has plans for where he’ll take his conspiracy theories next.
What happened: News satire site The Onion announced on Nov. 14 that it was buying Infowars.com (Trust Score: 7.5/100) for an undisclosed sum that will go toward the more than $1 billion in damages Jones owes to families of the victims of the 2012 school shooting in Newton, Connecticut, which Jones has called a hoax.
What’s next: A court hearing on the sale is planned for later this month after a bankruptcy judge expressed concern with the auction, The Associated Press (Trust Score: 95/100) reported.
If Jones loses his website for good, he already has a Plan B. In a live video Thursday, his team directed viewers to a new X account set up two months ago, called @AJNLive.
The Infowars audience is already migrating there:
As of early morning on Nov. 14, @AJNLive had 88,000 X followers, according to social media monitoring tool SocialBlade. By the next day, that total jumped to 236,500.
At 9:36 a.m. Nov. 14, just minutes after it was reported that The Onion bought Infowars, there were 10,800 X users watching Jones’ broadcast on @AJNLive — rivaling the size of the 12,500-person audience simultaneously tuning in at the @Infowars account.
Jones also told viewers he would ramp up AlexJones.network, which already features his live stream and old Infowars content from Jones’ program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
A defiant Jones told listeners Thursday morning: “That which does not kill us only makes us stronger.”
Reality Check is produced by Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
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