Washington
CNN
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Elon Musk has repeatedly misled the public about federal spending while playing a leading role in President Donald Trump’s effort to cut that spending.
When Musk was asked earlier this month about one of the inaccurate statements he had promoted, he conceded that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.” But “some” might be an understatement. The billionaire businessman has made or amplified numerous false or misleading assertions in the past month alone, largely on the X social media platform he owns.
Here are eight examples.
This list doesn’t include erroneous cost-savings claims on the website of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. And it doesn’t include the many vague Musk assertions that he hasn’t corroborated but that also can’t be definitively debunked at this time.
The White House didn’t respond to CNN requests for comment last week.
As the Trump administration worked to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Musk shared an X user’s post that claimed “USAID spent your tax dollars to fund celebrity trips to Ukraine, all to boost Zelensky’s popularity among Americans.” The post included a video, made to look as though it was from entertainment outlet E! News, that listed large sums various celebrities were supposedly paid for visits to Ukraine.
The video was a fabrication.
E! News never ran any such video. USAID never made those payments to the celebrities.
Ben Stiller, one of the actors the phony video claimed had received millions from USAID to go to Ukraine, said he “completely self-funded” his trip and received “no funding from USAID.”
Stiller attributed the “lies” to “Russian media,” and experts said the video indeed had the hallmarks of a long-running Russian deception campaign.
Musk took aim at the Reuters news agency he has previously criticized over its coverage of his business practices. He wrote on X: “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception’. That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
Musk’s comment itself deceived the public.
The contract Musk was talking about was awarded by the Department of Defense, during the first Trump administration, to bolster the military’s defenses against “social engineering” cyberattacks that use “social deception” tactics to trick humans. The money went to a “data-driven solutions” company called Thomson Reuters Special Services, not the Reuters news agency with which it shares a corporate parent — and, more importantly, neither company was paid to engage in deceiving the public.
Musk’s post didn’t mention that the spending document he was citing prominently features the words “active social engineering defense.” And he continued to post misleadingly about the contract even after his initial comment was fact-checked by news outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post.
Casting baseless suspicion upon tax credits under Trump and Biden
Musk shared an X user’s chart that purported to show the value of federal tax credits each year from 1990 through 2021. The chart, dubiously describing the tax credits as “IRS Welfare,” depicted a big jump in 2018, another big jump in 2020, and a peak in 2021.
Musk suggested there was something inexplicable or nefarious about these recent increases. He wrote: “Such a big jump in a short time doesn’t make sense.”
It makes perfect sense. The increases are easy to explain.
Trump signed an expansion of the child tax credit in his 2017 tax law, causing the increase in 2018. His 2020 pandemic relief legislation also provided various forms of relief to Americans through tax credits, causing the increase that year. President Joe Biden then approved a short-term expansion of the child tax credit in the pandemic relief law he signed in early 2021, causing the increase that year.
“There’s no mystery why the child tax credit increased in 2018 and again during the pandemic. The growth is the direct result of child tax credit expansions signed into law by President Trump and then President Biden to increase the credit’s maximum value, refundability and availability,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation think tank, told CNN.
Musk, declaring that “NYT is government-funded media,” shared a post from an X user who asserted the US government “gave the New York Times tens of millions of dollars over just the past 5 years,” including $26.9 million from the Department of Health and Human Services and $19.15 million from the National Science Foundation.
But those figures were not even close to correct.
The X user who made the post, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong, had done a flawed web search that was not actually limited to federal spending on The New York Times. As University of Central Arkansas economics professor Jeremy Horpedahl pointed out, Cheong’s search also brought up federal spending on other entities with “New York” in their names, such as grants to New York University.
When you limit the search to federal spending on The New York Times in the last five years, you find no Times spending at all from the HHS or National Science Foundation. This correct search shows that total federal spending committed to The Times since the beginning of 2020 was about $1.6 million, and that the biggest chunk came from subscriptions for the Department of Defense.
When press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at her first White House briefing that the Trump administration had spotted and thwarted a planned $50 million expenditure “to fund condoms in Gaza,” she attributed the supposed discovery in part to Musk’s DOGE team. Musk then promoted Leavitt’s words in a post on X, writing that this was the “tip of iceberg” and that he guessed “a lot of that money ended up in the pockets [of] Hamas, not actually condoms.”
But the claim was pure nonsense; Musk and the White House never had any evidence to substantiate it. Asked two weeks later about the inaccuracy, Musk made his concession that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.”
Musk then promptly continued to say incorrect things. Seizing on an inaccurate assertion from the reporter who asked him about the tale about condoms for Gaza, he criticized the US for supposedly sending $50 million in condoms to the African country of Mozambique — though that didn’t happen either.
Musk shared an X post from conservative activist Charlie Kirk that included a brief video clip of a “DOGE Clock,” an animated counter that showed a fast-increasing total of more than $109 billion. Kirk wrote, “Projected DOGE savings now near $110 billion, or over $700 per American taxpayer. And we’re just getting started…”
“Good progress,” Musk wrote.
But the “clock” does not actually measure DOGE’s progress.
At the time of Kirk’s post, DOGE was making an inflated claim of having saved an estimated $55 billion. In other words, the figure on the “clock” was roughly double DOGE’s own flawed number.
So what is the “clock,” exactly? The website that publishes it, USDebtClock.org, makes clear it is not tracking DOGE’s actual savings; it says it is tracking DOGE’s “savings objective.” The site, which is not affiliated with the government, didn’t respond to a CNN request to explain what precisely “savings objective” means — but Horpedahl said the “clock” tracks “what DOGE would need to have saved to be on track to balance the budget. It’s not a count of actual savings. It literally just adds $4 billion per day, regardless of what is happening in the real budget situation.”
Musk posted a chart on X he said showed how many people in different age brackets had a “death field set to FALSE” in a Social Security database — in other words, who were not listed as being dead. The chart included nearly 9 million people age 130 and older, who are obviously deceased. Musk joked, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security” — then added, “This might be the biggest fraud in the history of humanity.”
But the chart didn’t prove any fraud. It didn’t even show that millions of dead people are erroneously being sent Social Security money. Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Musk suggested.
That’s because of a critical fact Musk didn’t explain: Someone not having have their death listed in this Social Security database doesn’t mean they are actually getting Social Security money. Social Security already has a system in place to stop payments to people listed as being age 115 and older.
A 2023 report from the inspector general who monitors the Social Security Administration found 18.9 million people age 100 or older who were not marked as deceased on their database entry. But while the inspector general was critical of the Social Security Administration (SSA) over this issue, she also found that only 44,000 of these 18.9 million people were receiving payments.
Even those 44,000 payments were not obviously fraudulent or erroneous. The inspector general noted that a larger number of living people in the US, an estimated 86,000, were age 100 or older.
“Regarding the 44,000 figure, I’m confident that the vast majority of those are legit payments. So while there probably is some fraud, I don’t think these numbers show any evidence of it,” Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank who served as principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration during the George W. Bush administration, told CNN last week.
Biggs said that “while the SSA clearly should work to better ensure that Social Security numbers are deactivated when a person dies, it does not appear that this computer systems issue results in many benefits being paid out to people who should not receive them.”
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, who was elevated to that post by the current Trump administration, tried to set the record straight in a statement last week.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said.
Musk claimed on X earlier this month that the DOGE team had “just discovered” that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had the previous week sent $59 million to luxury New York City hotels “to house illegal migrants.” Musk then added, “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” He repeated the claim at a conservative conference on Thursday: “They took money from FEMA, meant for helping Americans in distress, and sent that money to luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York.”
The money was never meant for American disaster relief.
The cash came from a separate federal initiative, the Shelter and Services Program, in which Congress gave money to FEMA for the specific purpose of helping state and local governments and nonprofits house migrants.
Congress appropriated $650 million for this program in the 2024 fiscal year. It appropriated a much larger sum, more than $35 billion, for FEMA disaster relief in that fiscal year. These are just two distinct pots of money — as fact-checkers repeatedly noted when Trump and others made similar claims in the fall.
And there is additional context worth noting.
The Shelter and Services Program money was sent to the government of New York City, not directly to hotels, and the city said in a statement this month that of a recent allocation of about $59 million, about $19 million covered direct hotel costs for people seeking asylum; about $26 million was for services like food and security, while about $13 million was for group shelters and related services.
In addition, the city objected to the “luxury hotels” part of the claim, saying, “we have never paid luxury-hotel rates.” A report last year from the city comptroller, which studied the hotels that are part of a city contract to house people seeking asylum, found that the average daily rate paid by the city was $156 and that, of the hotels whose category class could be confirmed, none were in the highest-end “luxury” or “upper upscale” categories, while half were “economy,” 13% “midscale,” 25% “upper midscale” and 8% “upscale.”
Critics are free to make an argument that even this accommodation is overly generous. Regardless, Musk’s claim that it was paid with funds taken from disaster relief is flat wrong.
CNN’s Gloria Pazmino contributed to this article.
