FACT CHECK: Did Vice President JD Vance Say Elon Musk Is ‘Making Us Look Bad?’

A video shared on Facebook claims Vice President J.D. Vance purportedly said Tesla CEO and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead Elon Musk is “making us look bad.”

Verdict: False

The video’s audio has been generated with artificial intelligence (AI), according to Lead Stories. Vance did not make the purported remark. In addition, an AI expert denied the audio’s authenticity in an email to Check Your Fact.

Fact Check:

Vance’s comments about Denmark “not being a good ally” in relation to the U.S. potentially acquiring Greenland have recently resurfaced, according to The Independent. Vance’s wife and Second Lady Usha Vance will visit Greenland on March 27, the outlet reported.

The Facebook video claims Vance purportedly said Musk is “making us look bad.”

“Everything that he’s doing is getting criticized in the media and he says that he’s helping and he’s not. He’s making us look bad. He’s making me look bad. And I’ll tell you this, and he wouldn’t like it if I said it. But he’s not even an American. He is from South Africa.”

“And he’s cosplaying as this great American leader in a room that has the portraits of some of the greatest men that ever ran this country and he has the audacity to act like he is an elected official. I am an elected official. I am an important one in this situation, not him. So if he wants to tank the economy and his cars, maybe that’s what he deserves,” Vance appears to say via the same video’s audio.

The claim is false. Check Your Fact performed a content detection scan using the website “Deepware,” and the results indicate the video’s audio is 99% likely to be a “deepfake.” Likewise, Vance does not appear to have referenced the purported remark on his personal or government X accounts. Musk has not commented on the claim via his verified X account @elonmusk. President Donald Trump has not publicly addressed the claim, either.

In addition, Check Your Fact found no credible news reports to support the claim. Actually, the opposite is true.

On March 24, Lead Stories debunked the claim, indicating the video’s audio is AI-generated. According to the outlet, Vance’s Communications Director, Will Martin, denied the audio’s authenticity in a recent post shared on X. “This audio is 100% fake and most certainly not the Vice President,” Martin said, according to Lead Stories. (RELATED: Is Elon Musk Paying The Salaries Of The Rescued Astronauts For A ‘Full Year?’)

Furthermore, Dr. Walter Scheirer, an AI expert at the University of Notre Dame, denied the audio’s authenticity in an email to Check Your Fact.

“This audio track (and script) is likely AI-generated. The language is nonsensical in places, and the speaker abruptly stops at various points. For instance, at the end of the video, Vance makes the following statement in reference to Musk: ‘if he wants to tank the economy in his cars.’ Further, the transcript does not match the audio. Most important is the provenance of this post — it did not originate with the professional news media, and instead was posted by an ordinary user account,” Scheirer said.