Elon Musk is fed up with fake news stories about himself
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has had it with fake news stories about himself.
On Tuesday, the sustainable energy billionaire posted a tweet with link to a Bloomberg story calling out fake news stories about him. (He also made a timely South Park reference.)
Some of these stories include "Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9" on The Federalist news site, another on Libertarian Republic and "Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace" from the Liberty Conservative.
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Bloomberg reported all the stories on the conservative news sites are made up and written by a non-existent writer, Shepard Stewart. Gavin Wax, editor-in-chief of Liberty Conservative, told Bloomberg Stewart is "definitely a fake."
All the stories have since been taken down. Jalopnik.com managed to grab a screenshot of The Federalist story, an opinion piece by Stewart on the site's technology section, before it was taken down Tuesday.
The fabricated Stewart, who has a minimal online presence (the first clue he's not a real online journalist), has a headshot from the The Federalist that is eerily similar to a Bay Area startup CEO's Twitter and LinkedIn photo.
Through a reverse image search, Mashable found what looks like a Photoshopped version of Guy Yalif's photo being used as Stewart's image. In a message to Mashable Tuesday night, Yalif said his photo has "unfortunately" been used by other people a "couple of times before."
As Bloomberg noted, disrupting the auto and energy industries has made Musk quite a few enemies. It seems as if one of them has managed to annoy one of the most powerful people in the tech world.
Topics Elon Musk
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
