Has Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter, transformed from a tech visionary into a prolific purveyor of misinformation?

Before becoming the official owner of Twitter, Musk made several statements on how he would ensure that the social media platform continued to correct misinformation shared there.

Despite these early promises to combat false content on the platform he now owns, Musk has received criticism in the last few months for amplifying dubious claims, conspiracy theories, and outright falsehoods. His professed commitment to “free speech absolutism” has resulted in the amplification of divisive and potentially misleading content, making it more difficult for the public to discern fact from fiction.

We fact-checked four of the most misleading claims that he has recently shared.

Claim 1: Non-citizens are not prevented from voting

In posts online, Musk has been casting doubt on the 2024 elections and the voting systems.

“Probably, however, illegals are not prevented from voting in federal elections. This came as a surprise to me,” he said in an X post on Jan. 10.

But, non-citizens are prevented from voting in federal elections.

The 15th Amendment, the 19th Amendment the 24th Amendment and the 26th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution affirm the right of citizens to vote and prevent non-citizens from voting in federal and state elections.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was also passed by Congress to prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Some non-citizens can only vote in local elections in California, Maryland, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.

These types of misinformation posts about the voting system can be harmful and lead to people misinterpreting the facts on who is allowed to vote in federal elections leading to real consequences. Individuals may be fined, have to spend one year in prison for violating the act or be deported.

Claim 2: New York mayor is giving undocumented immigrants $10K gift cards

In another misleading claim about immigration, Musk pushed the claim that the Mayor of New York Eric Adams has plans to “give illegals $10,000 Debit Cards.”

Musk quoted posts sharing the claim saying, “this is crazy” in one post and “this is insane,” in another.

He also quoted “Wow,” to a separate tweet that read, “Breaking News: Mayor Adams plan is to give Illegal’s $10,000 each with No ID check required, No Fraud control and No Restrictions.”

But similar to the other misleading claims shared by Musk we’ve reported on, the posts don’t share the full picture.

While there is a plan in place for a pilot program to give immediate response cards to migrant families staying at city hotels, the program is not as described in posts.

In a partnership with the financial technology company Mobility Capital Finance, New York City launched a program to provide about 500 families with prepaid debit cards that will only have about $13 added a day for 28 days. The cards can only be used in grocery stores, supermarkets, bodegas and convenience stores, according to New York officials.

“I know on the first brush you look at it and say, ‘wait a minute, what are you doing, you’re giving people cards?’” Mayor Adams said in a press conference. “You’ll see ‘that this was a small policy shift that we’re doing on a pilot project with 500 people. If this is successful, we’re going to expand it even more.”

The program, which is similar to federal programs such as WIC, will replace an existing program implemented by the city that delivers non-perishable food items to families and is expected to save the city $7.2 million each year. The city has allotted $53 million for the program and its possible future expansion.

Adams also stated if the cards are abused they will be taken away.

Claim 3: Birth control makes you “fat, doubles risk of depression & triples risk of suicide”

Hormonal contraception is a birth control method that works to reduce or prevent ovulation by using estrogen and progestin, or progestin only to stop eggs from leaving the ovaries and stop the sperm’s access to an egg. Forms of this contraception include implants, an IUD, pills, vaginal rings and skin patches.

Musk recently shared a claim about the contraception method.

“Hormonal birth control makes you fat, doubles risk of depression & triples risk of suicide. This is the clear scientific consensus, but very few people seem to know it,” Musk shared in a Feb. 16 X post with links to a controlled observational study from 2017.

The study titled, “Association of Hormonal Contraception With Suicide Attempts and Suicides,” was published by the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Over several years, the study tracked women in Denmark aged 15 with no prior hormonal contraceptive use and assessed the risk of suicide after they started contraceptives. The findings concluded that there was an association between hormonal contraception and suicidal behavior.

However, the study also admits there are limitations to these findings.

“We cannot exclude individual time-dependent confounders, such as other major life events (bad sexual experience, break-up, divorce, etc.), which could potentially confound the key associations,” the study said.

Charlotte Wessel Skovlund, the lead author of the 2017 study, told us that the study and similar ones to it were observational and can only conclude an association not a “casual link,” though she states there is “is good scientific evidence of a relation between hormonal contraception use and mental health effect on a significant subgroup of women.”

“The studies are observational and can therefore only see if there is an association between hormonal contraception and the different depression parameters, not a causal link. But many parameters suggest that it could be a causal link, the timing of the events close after initiation of the contraception, dose response relation, higher risk for progestin only contraceptive,” Skovlund said

But other scientists say more research needs to be done.

The spread of misleading claims relating to birth control is increasingly dangerous because of the other benefits it provides besides preventing pregnancies.

Along with using it as a form of preventing pregnancy, people use hormonal birth control to ease period cramps and other symptoms or treat issues including uterine fibroids or endometriosis.

Claim 4: Biden has allowed 7.2 million undocumented immigrants into the US

On Feb. 23, Musk re-shared a post that included a screenshot of a Fox News article with a headline that reads “7.2M illegals entered the US under Biden admin, an amount greater than population of 26 states.”

He quoted the image and post and said, “I hope the public is waking up to this.”

The Fox News article was published three days before Musk’s post.

But the article headline misleads on the facts and doesn’t show the whole story.

The 7.2 million figure shared in the claims reflects how many encounters immigrants have had with border patrol, not the population itself.

It’s also important to note that not all encounter attempts at the border are unlawful.

According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there have been over 7.3 million encounters at the southwest U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office in Jan. 2021 to the end of Jan. 2024.

While there has been an increase in U.S. border encounters since Biden took office, so has the rate at which individuals are being removed or expelled.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told Snopes that, “Under [Biden’s] Administration, the estimated annual apprehension rate has averaged 78%, identical to the rate of the prior [Trump] Administration.”

False or misleading claims like the posts Musk made about New York migrant families or statistics about immigration can cause people to have an uninformed and bias understanding of the immigration process.

Brea Jones is a strategic leader and award-winning journalist who writes for the Sanford Herald. Previously, she worked to stop the spread of misinformation surrounding health and politics as a reporter with FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2015, Brea has written articles and produced multimedia for publications covering people, entertainment, politics, and health.