Altered video appears to show Elon Musk saying he’ll buy Meta

Elon Musk bought Twitter. Is he eyeing Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, next? 

A video recently shared on Instagram appears to show Musk predicting that he would buy Meta "tomorrow." 

"Facebook and Instagram will be mine, too," Musk appears to say in the video. 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

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The footage in the video comes from an April 2022 interview Musk gave while appearing at the TED2022 conference. But he didn’t mention Meta.

He mentioned Facebook and Instagram once in the context of how much Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg controls them. He did not say he would purchase Meta, which is a publicly traded company valued at around $300 billion as of Dec. 19, 2022. Musk purchased Twitter for about $44 billion, and Forbes estimates that Musk’s net worth is around $160 billion.

A TikTok account promoting an app to alter videos "where you can make any celebrity say anything" includes other posts with the same footage of Musk appearing to say things that he didn’t. Among them: that Musk loves Angelina Jolie, that he’s "starting to sell the first tickets to Mars," and that Apple CEO Tim Cook "pissed me off."   

These videos are altered, and so is the one in the Instagram post. We rate claims that it’s authentic False.