Elon Musk Did Not Offer To Buy Facebook To Delete It
The Claim
Entrepreneur Elon Musk wants to buy Facebook solely for the purpose of removing it from the Internet.
News posted on
Emerging story
A number of recent social media posts share what appears to be a news headline that states, “Elon Musk Offers To Buy And Then Delete Facebook.” These posts are sometimes accompanied with supportive messages, such as, “I love him.”
Thousands of people have interacted with the posts. Additionally, similar posts from earlier in 2021 and in 2020 have gained hundreds of interactions.
Misbar’s Analysis
The story about Elon Musk offering to buy and delete Facebook is a work of satire. The original report for this story, which is where the screenshot in the social media posts comes from, appears on the parody website Alternative Science. The author of the article, James Schlarmann, has written a number of other satirical pieces. For example, he authored one piece that claimed that a cat believed he would be better at being the president than Donald Trump.
This work of satire does riff on some real news, which is likely what has led people to mistake it for reality. In 2018, Musk took to Twitter to explain that he personally disliked Facebook shortly after he made the decision to delete the Facebook pages of Tesla and SpaceX, two companies he owns. He also gained attention in that same year for offering to buy out Tesla’s shareholders and make the company private once more. The content of the satirical story specifically mentions an offer to buy every share in the company, which is likely to be a reference to the Tesla offer.
