Fact Check: Elon Musk Did NOT Publicly State That Bill Gates Should Go To Prison As Of April 2024 — Claim Is From Site That Publishes ‘Fake News’ And Satire
Did Elon Musk publicly call for the arrest of Bill Gates as of April 2024? No, that’s not true: The claim originated from a website that publishes made-up news stories related to Musk. An online search by Lead Stores found nothing to substantiate the claim.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on April 25, 2024. The post included an image that read:
Elon Musk Announces Publicly
“It’s Time We Put Bill Gates In Prison, He’s Evil”
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon April 29 15:48:40 2024 UTC)
The first comment under the post was made by the user who published the post. It contained a link to an article from a website called SpaceXMania. The article was titled “Elon Musk: ‘It’s Time To Put Bill Gates In Prison,'” and it was published on August 27, 2023 (archived here). The article did not link to any credible sources to support its claim.
According to SpaceXMania’s “About Us” page (archived here), the articles posted on the website are not legitimate news:
Welcome to our website, owned and operated by Funky Productions LLC. We are a team of writers and editors based in New York, USA. Our mission? To bring you the freshest fake news, some sassy analysis, and a good dose of satire, all rolled into one crazy concoction that orbits around Elon Musk and everything that’s lighting up the viral/trending charts.
Lead Stories did a search using keywords on Google, visible here, which found no credible documents or reporting to corroborate the claim.
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to Elon Musk can be found here.
Other Lead Stories articles regarding SpaceXMania are here.
