A rumor that circulated online in early May 2025 claimed a Department of Government Efficiency investigation found billionaires Mark Cuban, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett participated in a "pay-for-play scandal" with former President Joe Biden's Treasury Department.
For example, a LinkedIn user posted (archived) the rumor along with photos of Cuban, Gates and Buffett.
(Scot O./LinkedIn)
The post's caption read:
These three billionaires received quarterly payments from Biden's Treasury Department in what looks like the largest pay-for-play scandal yet.
"Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett each donated over a billion dollars to the Biden 2020 campaign," said DOGE Auditor Joe Barron, "Then they were paid $250 million quarterly for four years, or $4 billion. The taxpayer subsidized their donation four times over."
Without DOGE, nobody would have ever known.
Variations of the rumor spread on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and X (archived).
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo and Google found no reporting suggesting DOGE or any other government entity uncovering a "pay-for-play scandal" involving the three men.
Rather, the rumor originated with America's Last Line of Defense — a network of Facebook pages and websites describing their output as satirical in nature. The network's posts and articles often feature the fake name "Joe Barron."
For example, the text reposted by the aforementioned LinkedIn user originated in a May 3 post (archived) on the ALLOD-managed Facebook page Reagan Was Right. The post's image showing the three men displayed an "S" for "satire" label, along with the words, "America's Last Line of Defense. Nothing on this page is real."
(Reagan Was Right/Facebook)
The Reagan Was Right page also includes a bio reading, "An authorized dumping ground for profitable right-wing propaganda and confirmation bias-based nonsense courtesy of America's Last Line of Defense. Nothing on this page is real."
A similar post (archived) on the America's Last Line of Defense Facebook page — the satire network's "flagship" page — claimed the U.S. Federal Election Commission, as opposed to DOGE, investigated the matter.
Snopes has addressed other untrue claims about Gates and Buffett in the past. For example, one rumor claimed Gates announced a $333 million bid to buy tech billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform X, while another said Buffett acquired Musk's carmaker Tesla for $1 trillion.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources calling their output humorous or satirical.