Elon Musk amplified a flurry of false claims and misinformation Wednesday in a period of online activity which, even by his own standards, was fairly unhinged.
The billionaire edgelord is no stranger to a reckless post, already attracting the ire of the White House this week over a tweet in which he wrote “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” Musk deleted that post— which came just hours after the second apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump—while passing it off as a joke, though the Secret Service apparently didn’t see the funny side.
Some people might decide to be more cautious online after such a snafu.
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But on Wednesday, Musk retweeted an X post to his nearly 200 million followers claiming there was a bomb threat in a car near a planned Trump rally on Long Island. The original poster deleted their tweet after the claim was shown to be wrong, while Musk’s own post about the matter—in which he’d written “wow” in response to the fake claim—remains live as of Thursday morning.
The Tesla boss on Wednesday also reshared a post alleging that ABC News had “falsely claimed the Springfield City Manager refuted Trump’s debate statement” about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio. The person speaking in the post’s video, however, was not the city manager, CNN reports. It was actually Springfield resident making unproven claims based on comments that he had “heard.”
That didn’t stop Musk sharing the misleading post came with the caption “Always Be Cheating News,” an apparent jibe at the ABC News moderators who swiftly fact-checked Trump’s claims about Haitian immigrants during his debate with Kamala Harris.
Several hours later, Musk also shared a map projecting a sweeping electoral college victory for Trump in the November elections. “Trending well,” Musk wrote in his quote-tweet of the map.
The post’s creator atrributed the map to Nate Silver, the pollster founder of FiveThirtyEight who now publishes on his Substack blog Silver Bulletin. But the map wasn’t real, with the actual map shared on Silver’s blog showing that—in contradiction to the poster’s claims—the race remains, in Silver’s words, a “tossup.”
