Does a viral video show Elon Musk walking together with his family and talking with his children? No, that's not true: A real photo from 2025 was used to generate the AI video. Other than the one source photo, the rest of the scene was imagined by AI. The video has an obvious glitch. It begins with a group of three adults and three children moving together and within seconds the two adult women walking behind Elon Musk vanish from the scene.
The fake video appeared in a post (archived here) published by the X account @American_p69 on July 27, 2026. It is captioned:
Elon Musk enjoying a rare family moment with his children. ❤️👨👧👦 Every great innovator is also a parent.
This is the thumbnail image from the AI-generated video, it is also the real photograph which was used to generate the fake video:
(Image source: @american_p69 post on X.)
The original photo was posted Feb. 13, 2025, on X (embedded below) by the Washington D.C. freelance photographer Andrew Leyden.
Elon Musk met with Indian PM Modi today in Blair House. pic.twitter.com/34zlLCsrxC
-- Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) February 13, 2025
Several outlets published photos of Musk and his family which were taken that day. A Feb. 13, 2025, article in the Daily Mail (archived here) identifies Shivon Zilis. Although her face is blocked in the Leyden photo, in the Daily Mail slideshow Zilis is pictured in profile wearing the purple coat. She is the mother of two of the children pictured. An additional photograph published by Bild (archived here) on March 2, 2025, shows a mostly unobscured view of the un-named woman dressed in black who was carrying the shopping bag and a box under her other arm. So all of the various hands and feet appearing in the Leyden photograph are accounted for.
As the ten-second video begins, a tight grouping of three adults and three children are shown moving together as depicted in the source photo (pictured above left). But this accurate scene rapidly devolves into an AI hallucination as the women vanish (pictured above right). The first four seconds of the video are shown slowed down in the GIF below.
(Image source: GIF from @american_p69 post on X.)
- At one second Musk's right hand moves from his coat to take his son's hand from Zilis. This handoff does not account for the distance between two adults who are walking one in front of the other. Their hands morph together.
- At two seconds the shopping bag carried by the woman behind Zilis passes in front of the purple coat as if passing it into Zilis' left hand. Again, the AI video generation tool has failed to account for the distance between people walking in a line. No trace of the woman who was carrying that bag is seen again.
- By three seconds the bag disappears and Zilis' left hand points upward.
- By four seconds Zilis has vanished entirely.
