‘Fooled’ by Troll, Fortune Deletes Fabricated Story Claiming Elon Musk Wanted Major X Overhaul – We Were ‘Intentionally Misled’ and ‘Apologize’

Kipp JonesJan 11th, 2025, 5:18 pm
 

Fortune published a story Thursday that was wrought with dubious claims about changes Elon Musk was alleged to have been planning to roll out for X users in the coming weeks. It was followed by a deletion and an apology to readers and the platform’s owner after the hoax was revealed.

In an article that went out on Fortune’s social media channels and to MSN and Google news, the publication claimed that Musk was planning major and obviously odd changes, including removing the date of publication from content posted to the platform.

In their correction, which is now the only thing at the URL for the story, the outlet says one of its reporters was duped by an X engineer whom Musk fired, and who claimed the billionaire wanted to charge an $8 fee for users signing up to use the platform. Additionally, Fortune’s source claimed Musk wanted to remove the timestamps – which Fortune’s Kali Hays said could “exacerbate misinformation” on X.

An account on X that elicited a reply from Musk has taken responsibility for the hoax and published a thread (below) detailing how they say it was perpetrated.

The public part of the saga played out when Hays’s article was published with the headline: “Elon Musk is pushing to remove dates from X posts and planning new $8 sign-up fee.”

Hays reported:

Musk has floated the idea of nixing date and time stamps from the timeline to X to employees in recent weeks, a person familiar with internal conversations told Fortune. The suggestion, which has raised worries among some staffers for its potential to exacerbate misinformation, comes as X is moving ahead with a separate plan to begin charging new users an $8 fee to sign-up and begin posting on the platform, two sources told Fortune.

[…]

Still, some X staffers believe removing the dates will make the platform needlessly “confusing” and will likely make issues of misinformation on the platform worse, the person noted. Historically, most users of Twitter, and now X, only casually scroll on the platform, rarely clicking through on individual posts. The absence of dates from the timeline would likely leave most users without vital context about information they are seeing.

Hays further claimed the baseless reporting a supposedly cash-strapped X would seek to bring in revenue from ordinary people who Musk would charge $8 to sign up, framing it with a dig at Musk by writing that it “comes as many large brand advertisers have fled X amid reports that hate speech and other offensive content has spread on the platform under Musk’s stewardship.”

Hays also included a too-good-to-check juicy quote from the hoaxer that Musk’s nefarious plan for “forcing more users to pay” for access to the platform is “the only way” it will be profitable. He also said he reached out for comment from X on the wild claims.

But all of that content has now been removed, and the article address now leads to a correction from the editorial team which admits Hays was misled and says the story failed to meet standards for publication.

CORRECTION: On January 9, Fortune published an article titled “Elon Musk is pushing to remove dates from X posts and planning new $8 sign up fee.” After publication, Fortune learned that a source that was central to this story had intentionally misled our reporter over a series of exchanges. The sourcing and story do not meet our editorial standards, and the story has been deleted. We apologize to readers and to Mr. Musk and employees of X.

Before Hays’s report was retracted and deleted, it was aggregated or shared by The Economic Times, Yahoo Finance, and other outlets.

Musk reacted to the report, the retraction, and how it was published with a retweet on Friday. An account called Fortune Expsosed claimed to have been behind misleading Hays and Fortune shared a thread about it and commented, “How I fooled @FortuneMagazine and Kali Hays.”

Musk replied, “That’s legacy media for you.”

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