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

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.

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Featured Fact-check

Threads posts

stated on October 26, 2024 in a Threads post

Four Florida counties had “zero results” Oct. 26, and “something underhanded might be happening.”

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. 

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.