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No, Elon Musk didn't post defending insurance companies after CEO shooting | Fact check
The claim: Image shows Elon Musk post about UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting suspect
A Dec. 9 Threads post (direct link, archive link) shows what appears to be an X post from Elon Musk that includes a surveillance image of the man suspected of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“It’s disgusting how everyone is turning this guy into some kind of folk hero,” reads the text of the purported post by Musk. “Insurance companies, like any company, have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits, no matter how ruthlessly. The radical left espousing otherwise needs to grow the hell up.”
The Threads post received more than 900 likes in a day. Similar versions shared to Instagram, Threads and X received hundreds of additional likes and reposts.
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The image of the X post is a fabrication. There is no record of it on Musk’s account.
No record of Musk post defending insurance companies
Authorities arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione on Dec. 9, five days after Thompson was shot to death outside a Manhattan hotel. Thompson's death unleashed scorn on social media aimed at the company and the American health insurance industry as a whole.
But Musk did not share the post attributed to him that defends those insurance companies. His X profile contains no record of it, and there are no credible news reports about the world’s richest person sharing it.
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The image bears a timestamp that indicates the purported post was made at 5:23 a.m. ET on Dec. 7. While Musk shared a post at that time, it is unrelated to the shooting and is instead a response to a post referencing Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Dan Meuser’s Dec. 6 appearance on Fox News.
The image of the purported post indicates it was viewed 3.6 million times when it was captured – a number that is identical in many versions of the image circulating on social media. Some versions are also cropped to remove the bottoms of the purported counts of responses, reposts and likes. Both are strong indications that the image is a fabrication that traces to a single source. It is likely that an authentic post would have been captured and shared by Musk’s 207 million followers with differing numbers of views and virality figures.
USA TODAY previously debunked false claims that images show X posts from Musk saying President-elect Donald Trump will ‘do anything I tell him to do’ and threatening to suspend X users who mock him.
USA TODAY reached out to Musk through the X press office and to several social media users who shared the image but did not immediately receive any responses.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fabricated Musk post defends insurers' pursuit of profits | Fact check