A story about tech billionaire Elon Musk paying the medical bills of a seven-year-old girl with a rare neurological disorder, Lily Thompson, is circulating online – but it’s not true.
The rumour began circulating online this month, with claims that Trump’s “special advisor” Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had paid Lily Thompson’s medical bills and arranged for her to have an experimental device, produced by his company Neuralink, implanted in her brain.
In January, Elon Musk announced that three volunteer patients had so undergone implantation of a chip, but the company website stipulates that those who apply for clinical trials must be adults. According to the rumour, which featured an AI-generated image, the implant led to the girl’s full recovery, with archived posts showing Musk next to her in hospital.
The caption claimed that Lily Thompson, who has a “degenerative brain disorder,” was helped by Musk, who “personally pledged to cover every penny of her care”, which had stretched into the millions of dollars.
“So, before you key a random person’s Tesla, or set fire to a Tesla dealership, or speak ill of the great Elon Musk, I ask you: what the hell did you do for Lily?” the caption concluded.
People in other posts thanked Musk for saving Thompson’s life, and an archived article on news.citestesitu.com seemed to back up the claim, but a closer look appear to prove that the timeline of events described did not add up, and the claim has not been picked up by any other publications.
The claim has been “rated false”, by fact-checking site Snopes, which said that AI text detectors ZeroGPT and GPTZero found it was a high probability that the article was AI-generated, while AI image detectors WasItAI and Decopy ruled that the images were highly likely to be the work of an AI programme.
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