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| - A rumor claiming tech entrepreneur Elon Musk said he planned to buy the McDonald's fast food restaurant chain circulated widely online in late 2024. Musk purportedly said, "I am officially buying McDonald's."
For example, on Oct. 15, 2024, an owner of the YouTube channel Voyager posted a video titled (archived), "Elon Musk: 'I am officially buying McDonalds.'" The clip received over 273,000 views and displayed a thumbnail image supposedly showing Musk and McDonald's employees.
The video's description read, "Today, we are diving into a groundbreaking story that's left the entire world in shock. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Twitter, has just made an announcement that nobody saw coming: he is officially buying McDonald's."
On Oct. 28, a TikTok user shared the same rumor in a different video earning more than 355,000 views (archived). A Facebook user later reposted the same clip.
In a third example of users sharing the rumor saying Musk bought McDonald's, on Nov. 2, an owner of the YouTube channel Elon Musk Rewind posted the same claim in yet another video featuring a thumbnail image different from the one shared in the aforementioned YouTube video (archived).
However, the rumor claiming Musk said "I am officially buying McDonald's" was false. We located no news reports or other credible information confirming anything about Musk buying McDonald's. The fact-checking websites Check Your Fact and PolitiFact also rated the rumor as false.
The people who created these videos used artificial-intelligence (AI) tools to generate fake thumbnail images and audio narration, and to even manage the clip selection and editing. Those users simply entered a text prompt as an order to the generative-AI tools to make the videos and thumbnail images.
For further reading, we previously reported about another video shared by the Voyager YouTube channel that falsely claimed Musk — Tesla's CEO — announced the company would be releasing a motor home in 2025 priced at less than $17,000. We also published reporting about a different video shared by the Elon Musk Rewind YouTube channel that falsely claimed Musk bought General Motors.
Musk Joked About McDonald's Ice Cream Machine Failures
While there was no truth to the rumor about Musk buying McDonald's, Check Your Fact noted he did at least once reference the fast food restaurant chain on Twitter in April 2022 — shortly after signaling his interest in purchasing that social media platform and prior to the site's name change to X.
On April 27, 2022, Musk shared a fake tweet screenshot purportedly showing a post on his account, reading, "Now I'm going to buy McDonald's and fix all of the ice cream machines." The fake tweet referenced how the fast food chain's ice cream machines purportedly experienced a series of issues over the years — a matter supposedly especially unique only to McDonald's.
Musk joked in his text above the image of the fake post (archived), "Listen, I can't do miracles ok."
Separate Satirical Rumor About Musk Buying McDonald's
In our research, we also noted a similar but still different rumor published on SpaceXMania.com — a website labeling its entertainment-oriented content as parody and satire.
On May 18, 2023 — about a year after Musk tweeted the above message — SpaceXMania.com published an article (archived) titled, "Just in: Elon Musk Teases Potential McDonald's Acquisition To 'Fix Their Ice Cream Machines.'" The story and website featured numerous labels noting the article's satirical nature.
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