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Ciara O'Rourke
By Ciara O'Rourke January 17, 2023

Altered video of Elon Musk uses 2017 interview about the future of transportation

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  • This video was altered. Elon Musk did not make these comments in the original. 
 
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The footage in a recent Instagram post is billed as a "leaked Elon Musk interview." In reality, it’s an old, widely covered interview with altered audio. 

In the clip, Musk appears to say: "You want to know the one thing that every failed leader that I ever met had in common? They don’t know the job of the people they were in charge of. Just as an example, let’s say you were a cashier. Would you trust your supervisor if push comes to shove, he didn’t even know how to use the register? No, of course you wouldn’t."

He goes on to seemingly make a crass comment.

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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In the interview from which this video clip was taken, Musk says none of these things. The audio clip in the Instagram post is fabricated. 

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The original footage, shared on YouTube by TED in May 2017, shows Musk talking about the future of transportation with TED’s head curator, Chris Anderson. 

We rate claims that the video clip in the Instagram post is authentic False.

 

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