No, this isn’t a real Elon Musk tweet about journalists getting ‘murdered’

Twitter recently suspended the accounts of several journalists and Elon Musk, the company’s owner, polled users on the social media platform about when he should reactivate them. 

But a purported tweet from Musk comparing the situation with the killings of journalists in other countries is not real. 

"You know, in some parts of the world, journalists get murdered for crossing the wrong people," reads what looks like a Dec. 16 Musk tweet. "Banning the reporters I don’t like from my own platform feels like a pretty innocuous alternative to me."

A Facebook post sharing this screenshot 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.)

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stated on November 14, 2024 in a Facebook post

Elon Musk has invented a small gadget to slash energy bills.

We found no evidence that Musk tweeted this. The tweet doesn’t appear on his account, nor among tweets he deleted that have been archived by PolitiTweet, which tracks the deleted tweets of high-profile figures. 

We found it posted on Reddit on Dec. 16 with the label "Satire/Fake Tweet," but not in any forums credibly claiming the tweet is real. 

Musk’s suspension of journalists’ accounts drew intense media coverage, and such a comment would be widely reported. It wasn’t. 

We rate claims that this is a real tweet False.