Did Ashley St. Clair, the MAGA influencer who says Elon Musk is the father of her child, confirm rumors that the billionaire oligarch had a “botched” penis enlargement surgery? There’s a screenshot of a tweet that’s going viral on social media right now that appears to show exactly that. But the screenshot is completely fake.
The tweet appears to have been created by an account on X called @marionumber4, which currently has the name 679 Enthusiast. The pseudonymous account has a long history of creating fake “deleted” tweets of right-wing figures like Musk, Candace Owens, and Grimes. And this one is no different.
By putting the words “this post was deleted” at the bottom of the fake tweet, it signals to the reader that any attempt to find the tweet on the person’s timeline is going to be a futile effort. And that appears to be part of the appeal for hoaxsters who create these kinds of fake viral tweets. But accounts like @marionumber4 have been doing this for so long, it’s easy to check with the usual photoshopping suspects whenever one of these is circulating online. The person behind that account has previously confirmed to Gizmodo that they make these fake tweets.
As the fake tweet gets shared outside of the original creator’s circles, it circulates with people wondering if it’s real. And X users now have the ability to ask Grok about the veracity of various tweets like a real-time AI fact-checker. That’s what people have been doing in the replies to various tweets about the supposed botched penis surgery. One user asked Grok “Is this real” on Monday and got an interesting reply.
“Ashley St. Clair likely broke an NDA by posting about Elon Musk’s ‘botched penis,’ given their relationship and typical NDA use,” Grok responded. “She may face financial fallout, as seen in custody and support disputes, but the claim of a specific penalty for penis comparisons is likely exaggerated, not standard in NDAs.”
The reference to an NDA appears to have been a joke by the X account UAE Exotic Falconry and Finance. But Grok’s fixation on some kind of non-disclosure agreement looks like a product of the leading question rather than something that actually exists. Neither Musk nor St. Clair appear to have discussed an NDA about their relationship and it’s not publicly known if one actually exists.
That ambiguity speaks to one of the major flaws in technology with generative AI. If you feed it enough garbage, you’re just going to get garbage back. And X is nothing if not a flaming garbage dump right now. Musk bought the platform in late 2022 and did everything he could to scare off normal people with his far-right ideology. Fringe figures who had previously been banned on Twitter, like white supremacist Nick Fuentes and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, were welcomed back with open arms. And that’s made X a mess of misinformation and extremist activity.
The tweet from St. Clair is fake, but what about the underlying claim that Musk had a botched penis surgery? That one is harder to debunk. Snopes took a look at the claims back in February when they first surfaced and couldn’t land on a definitive answer. One of the claims about the billionaire getting a penile implant appears to come from X user Cloning Hour on Feb. 20, as Snopes notes. Such a claim would be easy to dismiss as a joke, except that musician Azealia Banks who wrote “Grimes told me this too,” about the claim. Banks has a long history of feuding with Grimes and Musk, dating back to when she was hanging out with Grimes in 2018.
The “botched” penis surgery claim has also been used to explain why Musk has had so many children through IVF. The Tesla CEO has at least 14 children.
“Most of Elon Musk’s kids were conceived through IVF. He used IVF for his first five sons. His whole identity as a man is wrapped up in reproducing, which he can’t seem to do on his own (botched penile implant),” X user Ola Ojewumi wrote on Feb. 20.
Musk’s daughter Vivian, who’s been estranged from her father since she came out as trans, has previously written on Threads that the billionaire uses IVF to make sure he gets a male child.
“The gender I was assigned at birth was a commodity that could be purchased and paid for,” she wrote, according to the Economic Times. “Therefore, I was defying the advertised product when I was feminine as a child and later discovered that I was transgender.”
Again, it’s hard to say definitively whether the rumors about Musk’s supposed penis surgery are true. But we can definitely say that the tweet going viral right now purporting to come from Ashley St. Clair is fake. Efforts to reach Musk through his companies X and Tesla did not receive a reply Tuesday. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
