Trump Deepfake Bans Tesla Production
By Nicole Dirks
What happened: Social media users, capitalizing on the public feud between President Donald Trump and his former confidant Elon Musk, are sharing an AI-generated video that falsely depicts Trump as banning Tesla production in the U.S. The same video shows Trump supposedly accusing Musk of having “stabbed him in the back” by “lying about my involvement in the Epstein files.”
Context: When Musk left his role as special White House advisor in late May, he voiced his opposition to the significant spending in the Trump-backed federal budget bill. The rift escalated into a full-blown public feud in early June, when Trump and Musk traded insults on their respective social media platforms, Truth Social and X.
At one point, Musk expressed agreement with a post calling for Trump to be impeached, and he claimed without evidence in a since-deleted post that Trump is “in the Epstein files,” referring to documents compiled by federal authorities during investigations into the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A closer look: In the video, the Trump deepfake states: “Today, I am here to announce that I will be banning the production of all Teslas in the United States of America effective immediately. As everyone knows, Elon stabbed me in the back a couple of days ago and went crazy on his platform X, lying about my involvement in the Epstein files, so I can’t have that snake Elon making money in this country while I’m the president…”
You can watch the video here:
X user @ExSecular posted the video and added, “This is getting dirtier by the day.” The video garnered 579,700 views and 2,200 likes in one day.
Pro-Musk X user @Shamsher_Ali posted the video and stated: “President Donald Trump banned Tesla production in the USA. This happened when a drama-driven leader got selected through propaganda, this is poor governance. Stay calm and be strong @elonmusk @Tesla.” The post received 15,600 views and 35 likes in one day.
Actually: As noted above, the video is an AI deepfake. Trump did not ban Tesla production or say that Musk “stabbed him in the back.”
The video appears to have originated in a June 8 Instagram post by @dangerousaireturns, an account affiliated with a user who goes by “DangerousAi” on multiple platforms and who states in a YouTube account description that he posts “AI Parody content.” The accounts spreading the Trump video did not label the clip as AI-generated.
NewsGuard ran the video through AI detection software Hive, which determined that the video was 99.9 percent likely to be AI-generated.
In a June 7 NBC News interview, Trump called Musk’s Epstein accusation “old news,” adding: “This has been talked about for years and years. And as you know, I was not friendly with Epstein for probably 18 years before he died. I was not at all friendly with him.”
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