Elon Musk Tweets Plagiarized Article Bylined by Fake Writer

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, used his X-formerly-Twitter account to boost a plagiarized article bylined by a fake journalist.

On Saturday, Musk reshared a screenshot of a Medium article on X — the social media website he also owns — by the noted shitposter who goes by the handle "Wall Street Silver." The article's headline reads "45% of Women Estimated to be Single and Childless by 2030," with subtext declaring that "recent data" estimates "that 45% of women between ages 25 and 44 will be single and childless by the time 2030 rolls around," and that "the number of single women in the U.S. is expected to rise 1.2% every year." These figures are followed by images of women including the trans activist Dylan Mulvaney.

Musk, a leading figure in the pronatalist movement, added the caption: "This is extremely concerning!!"

Immediately, there were some red flags — starting with the framing of the numbers themselves. Forty-five percent of women in general and 45 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 44 are very different figures; that the article was posted on a self-publishing site like Medium, where there's no guarantee of an editorial process, rang further alarm bells.

So we decided to do some digging. As it turns out, a few Google searches and some basic scrutiny revealed that Musk shared a wildly unreliable, mangled piece of information published to Medium under the byline of a fake writer — and somehow, that wasn't even the worst thing about it.

The article was published to Medium back in January of this year, under the byline of an alleged author named "Mark Higley." Dozens of articles have appeared under that name for a Medium publication called The Savanna Post — but that's it. He has no publishing history outside his Medium profile, and no social media footprint. A reverse image search for the headshot associated with his Medium profile returns a stock photo from Pexels.

When we looked into other alleged writers with bylines in the Savanna Post, there were similar signs of counterfeit: no broader writing history, no presence on social media, and many headshots traceable to stock image or clipart websites. And when we ran headlines from the Savanna Post's archive through Google, we found that nearly all of the page's articles are plagiarized word-for-word from other websites and publishers. (There's at least one bylined Savanna Post who does appear to be real, and lists themself as the site's "publisher" on LinkedIn. We reached out with questions but have yet to hear back.)

That includes the post shared by Musk, which was originally published by an alt-right women's lifestyle publication called Evie Magazine. Evie's articles range from innocuous lifestyle posts about fashion trends to a range of bizarre and often harmful content including vaccine misinformation, a bevy of wildly unscientific assertions about women's health, anti-trans fearmongering, unsupported "psyop" conspiracies, and pro-life messaging that often includes false claims about safe and effective abortion drugs. (It also has an associated period-tracking and fitness app for which the lead investor is Palantir cofounder and libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel.)

In other words, Evie isn't a reliable source of news and information, nor is it simply a conservative outlet. It's a deeply conspiratorial website that ignores scientific facts and critical reasoning. This goes for the Musk-shared post, which is riddled with factual problems and misrepresented data.

For starters, there's the topline claim that the "45 percent" estimate is from a "recent" prediction. In fact, the estimate that the article centers on is from a Morgan Stanley report published back in September 2019 — meaning that the supposedly fresh figures are nearly five years old.

The article certainly isn't a thoughtful or data-based analysis of these years-old estimates, either. The author uses the prediction to rail against women's advancement in the workforce, writing that "sadly, many women have adopted the modern feminist lifestyle and have chosen to sleep around, abort their baby if they unexpectedly get pregnant, and swear off marriage." She then adds that these "cultural trends are going to have a tremendous impact on the future of American society," and to bolster that thesis, writes that "surveys show that women who are unmarried and childless tend to struggle more with mental illness and feelings of self-confidence," adding that "promiscuous sex" has a "negative impact" on the mental health of young women. To support these latter two claims about women's mental health, she links, respectively, to two sources: a descriptive study conducted by a pair of Algerian scientists and published in the journal The Eurasia Proceedings of Educational & Social Sciences in 2017, in addition to another Evie article.

Neither of these resources actually supports the writer's argument, however. The Algerian study, which examined a cohort of 200 women in Western Algeria, did find that unmarried women were suffering from higher levels of depression and stress, as well as lower levels of self-confidence. But the researchers concluded that their distress stemmed from the pressure to marry and the stigma that unmarried Arabic women often face — and not because being unmarried, in a vacuum, somehow breaks women's brains. Evie ignores this context entirely, linking only to a Cambridge Press page from a later recirculation that doesn't even include the study's full text — and instead uses the survey to propagate the very stigma that the research addresses.

Meanwhile, that second Evie article, titled "Promiscuous Women and Weak Men are a Complimentary Problem," is purely opinion-based and offers no data or research to support the statement that promiscuity is damaging women's mental health. It doesn't even include the words "mental" or "health," separately or together.

From top to bottom, in other words, it's a cherry-picked mess of bogus claims and misrepresented research. But you wouldn't know that from the misleading, context-free headline that Musk reposted — which, again, wasn't even a screenshot of the original article, but was instead an image of a plagiarized version published under the name and stock photo-supplied headshot of a completely fake person.

In recent months, Musk has upped his attacks on what he frequently refers to as the "legacy" or "mainstream" media — so, basically, known news organizations that generally have editorial standards and enforceable systems of accountability and ethics in place. He's repeatedly referred to the vague bogeyman of mainstream media as a propaganda engine, and meanwhile has encouraged netizens to, like him, get their "news" primarily from X. (Musk has also endorsed former president Donald Trump for president, another figure who has used their platform to sow public distrust in media institutions.)

"I don't read the legacy media propaganda much anymore," the centibillionaire wrote in a September 2023 X post, calling it a "waste of time."

"Just get my news from X — much more immediate, has actual world-class subject matter experts and tons of humor," he added. "Sooo much better!"

Instead, the world's richest person — not to mention one of its most powerful unelected figures — seems to keep using the site to amplify actual propaganda.

As of this article's publishing, Musk's tweet has been viewed over 70 million times.

More on Elon Musk's media literacy skills: Gullible Elon Musk Falls for Fake News Again, Deletes Post