Every Time Elon Musk Has Apologised, Retracted, or Deleted

Posted, deleted within hours, apologised roughly three months later

Platform: Twitter · Musk had owned the company for under three days

Deleted and later apologised

Two days after an intruder attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer at his San Francisco home, Musk replied to a post by Hillary Clinton with a link to an article on the Santa Monica Observer, a site fact-checkers rate as low-credibility, which advanced an unfounded claim about Pelosi’s personal life and cast doubt on the police account.

His comment: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” It reached an audience of more than 100 million followers and gathered over 24,000 retweets and 86,000 likes before he deleted it the same afternoon. The claims in the article were subsequently disproved by police disclosures and body-camera footage.

Roughly three months later, replying to a post asking why anyone would expect him to apologise, he did:

Apologised publicly, on stage, roughly two weeks later

Covered in full on our page: What Elon Musk Actually Posted in November 2023

Apologised — post not deleted

At the New York Times DealBook Summit on 29 November 2023, Musk said he should not have replied to the post, that he had handed a loaded gun to those who hate him and arguably to antisemites, and that he was quite sorry. He described it as possibly the worst and dumbest thing he had ever posted.

Minutes later in the same interview he told departing advertisers to go fuck themselves. Both passages are reproduced in full on the linked page, because publishing either alone misrepresents the event.

Deleted after roughly 30 minutes. No acknowledgement.

Platform: X · during the disorder following the Southport killings

Deleted without acknowledgement

Musk shared a post by Ashlea Simon, co-leader of the far-right party Britain First, containing a fabricated screenshot styled to look like a Telegraph article. The fake headline claimed Keir Starmer was considering building emergency detainment camps on the Falkland Islands to hold rioters. It carried the byline of a real Telegraph journalist.

Musk captioned it with two words: “Detainment Camps”. The post was viewed between 1.7 and 2 million times over roughly half an hour before he removed it.

The Telegraph confirmed no such article had ever been published, describing it as a fabricated headline for an article that does not exist, and said it had asked platforms to take the post down. Musk did not acknowledge posting or deleting it.

Deleted. Described as having gone too far.

Platform: X · during the public breakdown of his relationship with the President

Deleted, and characterised as excessive

During an escalating public dispute, Musk posted that it was time to drop a very large allegation and asserted that Trump appeared in the Epstein files, saying this was the reason they had not been made public. He also appeared at one point to call for the President’s impeachment. Both posts were subsequently deleted, and he indicated the attacks had gone too far.

This episode is not about race and sits outside the main subject of this site. It is included because this page indexes retraction behaviour, and excluding an instance because it is off-topic would distort the pattern.

Apology issued by the company, not by him personally

Covered in full on our page: When Grok Produced Antisemitic Content

Corporate apology and technical post-mortem

xAI apologised for what it called horrific behaviour by its chatbot, published an explanation naming the instructions it blamed, and said it had removed the code and refactored the system. Musk’s own response addressed the difficulty of the engineering problem rather than the content.

This is a company apologising for a product. It is recorded here for completeness and distinguished from a personal retraction.