Fact check: Eight ways Elon Musk has misled Americans about government spending

Washington CNN — Elon Musk has repeatedly misled the public about federal spending while playing a leading role in President Donald Trump’s effort to cut that spending. Promoting a phony video about USAID and celebrities As the Trump administration worked to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, Musk shared an X user’s post that claimed “USAID spent your tax dollars to fund celebrity trips to Ukraine, all to boost Zelensky’s popularity among Americans.” The post included a video, made to look as though it was from entertainment outlet E! The contract Musk was talking about was awarded by the Department of Defense, during the first Trump administration, to bolster the military’s defenses against “social engineering” cyberattacks that use “social deception” tactics to trick humans. Promoting a false claim about government spending on The New York Times Musk, declaring that “NYT is government-funded media,” shared a post from an X user who asserted the US government “gave the New York Times tens of millions of dollars over just the past 5 years,” including $26.9 million from the Department of Health and Human Services and $19.15 million from the National Science Foundation. Making a false claim about FEMA spending on migrant housing Musk claimed on X earlier this month that the DOGE team had “just discovered” that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had the previous week sent $59 million to luxury New York City hotels “to house illegal migrants.” Musk then added, “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” He repeated the claim at a conservative conference on Thursday: “They took money from FEMA, meant for helping Americans in distress, and sent that money to luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York.” The money was never meant for American disaster relief.