Digitally Altered Video Shared to Claim Elon Musk to Buy Meta And Instagram

The original video was from Elon Musk's interaction with the head of TED, Chris Anderson.

Fact-Check: Elon Musk has not said he plans to buy Meta and Instagram. 

(Photo: The Quint)

A video of billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk saying he would buy Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and Instagram has been shared by people on the internet.

The claim: The video, which has been viewed over two million times, shows Musk predicting that he would buy Meta and and Instagram.

An archive of the post can be found here.

(Source: Instagram/Screenshot)

(The post was also shared on Facebook.)

The claim comes a month after Musk's takeover of the microblogging website, Twitter.

The truth: The viral video has been altered to make the false claim. The original video was from Musk's conversation with the head of ‘TED’, Chris Anderson, and he didn't say anything about buying Meta.

How did we find that out:

• We looked for news reports to verify the claim but were unable to find any such report in a credible news organisation.

• We then took a screenshot from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search on Google.

• We found Musk's interview on the American nonprofit TED's official YouTube channel, where he was interacting with the head of the company, Chris Anderson, in April 2022.

The viral video was clipped from Musk's interaction with the Anderson.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

• We went through the entire interaction but at no point in the video did Musk mention he was planning to buy Meta or Instagram.

How was the video created?:

• While going through the results in the reverse image search, we came across a post on TikTok that had the same viral video.

• The profile that posted the video said that the video was created using something called the Gleesent App, which allows people to create lypsynced videos of celebrities.

• The profile also have many other videos created by the application, including a tutorial.

Conclusion: A digitally altered video was shared to falsely claim that Musk was planning on buying Meta and Instagram.

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