In May 2025, posts surfaced on social media alleging that Jamal Roberts, the winner of Season 23 of "American Idol," had turned down an advertisement for Tesla, the electric car company owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, without any evidence to corroborate the claim. The assertion was false.
The clips surfaced following the show's season finale on May 18 that crowned Roberts the winner.
The posts did link to news articles supposedly reporting on the happenings, but those articles were from websites that could not be considered reliable sources of information.
The articles were written with strange headlines — one began "HOLY SHOCKWAVES" — even stranger typographic choices — another site replaced the Latin alphabet "n" and "u" with the similar-looking Cyrillic p, "п," and Greek upsilon, "υ," — and none cited any trustworthy source backing up the assertion that Roberts had rejected an advertisement offer from Tesla or Elon Musk.
Despite the fact that the post's underlying claim was false, the story about Roberts and Musk could seem believable because of Roberts' newfound success and Tesla's recent struggles, as Musk's close relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump has proven quite controversial.
Adding a tiny bit of truth to a claim can help such videos with baseless celebrity rumors generate hundreds, or thousands, of comments from YouTube users. Some of those messages indicate that people interpret the videos to be real news.
The claim's structure followed a tactic Snopes has covered in the past — spreading a claim through Facebook posts, with links back to a shoddy news website meant to generate ad revenue. One site sharing the rumor, celebnews.noithatnhaxinhbacgiang.com, listed a fictional mailing address, 1234 Broad St., Arlington, Virginia. Another site's terms of service revealed it was operating from Vietnam.
This was not the first rumor about Tesla advertisements that followed this model and captured social media users' attention. For example, we previously debunked the false claims that the Los Angeles Dodgers and Green Bay Packers turned down similar ad offers from Tesla. Both those claims had similar origins.