--- title: "Elon Musk Claims Axe Murderer Targeted His Employees, Cops Say They Have No Idea What He’s Talking About" description: "San Francisco police say they never heard anything about an axe murder that Elon Musk has claimed attacked his employees." date: "2025-01-16" modified: "2025-01-16" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-axe-murderer" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "elon musk" - "misinformation" - "the digest" --- # Elon Musk Claims Axe Murderer Targeted His Employees, Cops Say They Have No Idea What He’s Talking About ![San Francisco police say they never heard anything about an axe murder that Elon Musk has claimed attacked his employees.]() *\Image: Jim Watson / AFP / Alex Wong via Getty / Futurism\* ## Truth Crime Tough-on-crime crusader Elon Musk claims that there was an axe murderer on the loose in the city of San Francisco who tried to kill several of his employees, with the authorities doing nothing to catch the assailant. The key word in all of this being "claims." "About a year ago, a guy tried to kill three X employees with an axe outside the former Twitter HQ in SF. They reported it to the police, but nothing was done," Musk tweeted, responding to the account End Wokeness (a favorite of his). "He later killed someone with that axe." If this is true, the city has become so utterly lawless that the cops never got wind of the grisly murder. On Monday, local police said they could find no records supporting Musk's story, the [*San Francisco Chronicle* reports]() — evidence that, once again, Musk may be simply [be fibbing]() or falling victim to [preposterous rumors](). "Based on the information provided, we cannot find any incident that matches this description in that location in 2023 or 2024," Evan Sernoffsky, a San Francisco police spokesperson, told the *Chronicle*. ## Tall Fails Yes, it would be remiss to take the authorities at their word. But Musk can't even get his own story straight here. As we'll show, he's made these claims before, changing key details literally every time he's done so. When Musk shared a similar account last April, he [stated]() that "several" employees were threatened "by a guy with a machete" outside a Walgreens — not with an axe, and not outside Twitter headquarters. "They didn't report it," Musk claimed, "because that doesn't constitute an arrestable crime in California. That guy later killed 3 people." His most recent version of events, however, purports that the employees *did* report the crime — and that the assailant only killed one person. In an [interview]() with Tucker Carlson last October, Musk threw in another variation in body count: the hatchet man, back to menacing employees outside Twitter HQ rather than a drugstore, killed two people, according to the *Chronicle.* ## Facts vs Feelings Musk has frequently lied and spread conspiracy theories in his railing against crime, foreigners, and anything else that can be pinned on the "woke" agenda. Last year, for example, he chimed in the conservative [moral-panic-of-the-moment]() by accusing Haitian immigrants of being "[cannibals]()," while spreading other unfounded claims. He's even suggested that most [homeless people don't exist](), and that the word "homeless" is "usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts." Given his conflicting reports and his history of fabulism — whether as part of the culture war [or to prop up his enterprises]() — it's hard to take this axe-slash-machete murderer tale of his seriously. The real axeman of San Francisco may in fact be Musk himself: after taking over Twitter, he annihilated 80 percent of its workforce, or more than 6,000 employees. **More on Musk:** *[Without Evidence, Elon Musk Says He's Saved Thousands of Lives in LA Wildfires]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()