On Facebook, Elon Musk is an invention superhero. But many of these posts are made-up and feature AI

Elon Musk has been credited with a lot of things: Tesla. SpaceX. Twitter’s rebrand to X. 

But, on Facebook, he has also been credited with some spectacular new inventions: a Tesla water engine. A $1,000 Tesla e-bike. Low-cost Tesla houses. A robot for surrogate pregnancies. A "UFO fighter jet that defies physics."

If these seem fake, it’s because they are. Musk didn’t launch or release such creations. But Facebook users post images that make these seem real, and that make it seem as if Musk was behind them all.

Musk is a well-known inventor, but since he joined President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail and in his incoming administration, Musk has grown politically prominent. Trump tapped Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernment entity.

PolitiFact examined some of the pages that regularly spread content touting Musk and his fake inventions. Along with misleading captions, these pages post images that appear to be created using artificial intelligence and show Musk smiling alongside sleek, futuristic noninventions.

We analyzed at least 12 posts with these claims and the posters behind them. Four pages we analyzed that recently shifted to Musk-related content collectively had 148,200 followers as of Nov. 19. The posts mislead people into thinking they can avail of cost-cutting solutions and devices, and that they have Musk to thank for making them accessible. 

Some pages sharing this content started out sharing innocuous posts unrelated to Musk before suddenly shifting to Musk invention claims before Election Day.

Kai-Cheng Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Northeastern University's Network Science Institute, said there have been similar campaigns to drive engagement using AI-generated images, featuring topics such as architecture, cooking and natural disasters.

"Elon Musk might be just one of the themes but this genre has become popular during this election because of the critical role he played," he said. "The operators behind these pages and the scammers were probably just trying to find themes that would catch people’s eyes, and Elon Musk is a great choice for them."

Researchers believe that Facebook’s recommendation algorithm at times serves AI-generated images to people who don’t follow pages with such content. The increased interest in Musk, along with the availability of AI tools to create eye-catching visuals, now seems to have formed a strategy for page owners seeking to profit from the posts’ engagement and from clicks to websites they want viewers to visit.

Claims attributing fake inventions to Musk are not new. In August, we debunked a claim that Musk announced his "first robot girlfriend." In January, we rated False a claim that he invented a heater that would cut power costs to "basically $0. In December 2023, we found assertions that he invented an energy-saving device that would cut electricity bills by 80% to merit Pants on Fire ratings.

But as Election Day neared — and even after the race was called — posts of this nature surged as the pages that hosted them converted to Musk-related content. A page called "Beautiful Mansions," created in December 2023, originally posted real estate photos. Another page titled "Easy Eats and Tips," created Oct. 11, populated its feed with recipes and food photos. Aircraft, warships and other warfare filled the feeds of two other pages, called "The Jet Fighter" and "Earth Guardian." 

But each of these accounts started making multiple posts a day about Musk’s supposed inventions — "Earth Guardian" flipped on Oct. 13, "The Jet Fighter" on Oct. 23, "Beautiful Mansions" on Nov. 7 and "Easy Eats and Tips" on Nov. 8.

"Beautiful Mansions" and "Easy Eats and Tips" often point readers to links in the comments, but those links lead to pages that  include no transparency about who runs the websites or writes for them.

(Screen recording from Facebook)

Their messages promise accessible, life-changing innovations. And Musk is the genius behind them — someone who keeps coming up with solutions that will improve lives.

Although some people coming into contact with these posts call them out as being AI, others express interest and even gratitude. 

"At my age of 72 (years) old I wish I can have this amazing Tesla motorbike and take a ride for my daily activity," one commenter wrote on a Nov. 10 Facebook post hyping Tesla’s "NEW CHEAPEST electric motorbike today!" for just $499. (There’s no such bike.) "Hope that Mr. Elon Reeve Musk can make a Tesla cheaper bike like this for a Senior Citizen."

(Screenshots from Facebook)

Yang said it’s likely that pages sharing this content are trying to grow their followers to eventually deploy a scam.

"My understanding is that many users cannot tell these images are AI-generated and genuinely believe they are real and like them," Yang said. "There are also people who can tell the nature of the images but engage with them nevertheless." 

PolitiFact encountered these pages because some of their Musk-related posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Meta’s demotes fact-checked misinformation and it has a policy of labeling content it detects was generated using AI tools. However, the label did not appear on any of the posts we reviewed. Meta did not respond to PolitiFact’s questions about these pages and posts.

Although we can’t be sure of the motive behind these posts, the accounts that share them have characteristics that align with those described in a peer-reviewed paper published by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. In it, authors Renée DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein, who are affiliated with Georgetown University, found that profit-motivated Facebook page owners used AI-generated images to boost engagement and traffic on the ad-supported external sites they link to. 

As with the Musk pages, many pages the Georgetown researchers studied suddenly changed their names and/or page subjects, or they were stolen or repurposed. Posts directed users to websites the researchers described as "heavily ad-laden content​ farm domains — some of which themselves appeared to consist of primarily AI-composed text."

The researchers wrote that during their research, they began encountering more AI-generated images in their personal feeds, even though they did not follow or engage with the pages posting that content. That led them to conclude that Facebook’s algorithm could be to blame.

"The Facebook Feed at times recommends unlabeled AI-generated images to users who do not explicitly follow the Page posting the content," DiResta and Goldstein wrote. "We suspect these high levels of engagement are partially driven by the Facebook recommendation algorithm."

In their report, Meta told the researchers that it looked into the sites they had reviewed and "demoted the clickbait sites under our Content Distribution Guidelines." Facebook defines clickbait links as posts that "lure people into clicking on an included link by creating misleading expectations about the post or article’s content."

In its own story about the onslaught of AI-generated Musk content that appeared on Facebook before the election, 404 Media, a digital media company, noted that one Indian YouTube vlogger appeared to identify this strategy as a way for content generators outside of the U.S. to grow "USA Channels." 

Since the election, "Beautiful Mansions," "Earth Guardian," "Easy Eats and Tips" and "The Jet Fighter" have continued to post claims about Musk.

One Nov. 13 post by "The Jet Fighter" said, "Elon Musk declared SR-72 Darkstar is finally ready to fly." The aircraft would supposedly "revolutionize aerial warfare and global surveillance." SR-72 is an aircraft being developed by Lockheed Martin as of 2016; Darkstar was a fictional aircraft with real capabilities built for the movie "Top Gun: Maverick."

Musk has no recorded connection to such an aircraft. Nevertheless, one comment said, "This guy doesn't mess around. No wonder Trump put him to work. How can we lose?"

CORRECTION, Nov. 21, 2024: Although their research was published in a Harvard University journal, Renée DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein are affiliated with Georgetown University. An earlier version of this story was inaccurate on their university affiliation.