PolitiFact – Video of Elon Musk talking about a new way to unlock a Tesla is fake

A video on Instagram claims to show Tesla CEO Elon Musk announcing a new feature on the electric car.

“Yeah, so the newest Tesla feature is that the seat will take a high resolution scan of your balls,” Musk appears to say in the March 27 video, which includes captions of his supposed comments. “You can then use your ball print to biometrically unlock and start the car. We call the tech ‘particular testicular detection.’” 

This video is a deepfake. It was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.)

Using reverse image search with a screenshot from the video, PolitiFact found that the  footage is from Musk’s March 3 interview at the World Government Summit, an annual event held in Dubai by a nonprofit organization of the same name. (To find out how we conduct reverse image searches, learn more here). 

In the real video, Musk did not reference “particular testicular detection.” Instead, the video transcript on YouTube shows that during the 35-minute interview, he talked about topics including misinformation on Twitter and the search for a new Twitter CEO, the need for safety in artificial intelligence, and his fears of a so-called single-world government — which made several news headlines.

We rate the claim that Musk was talking about a new feature to unlock and start a Tesla Pants on Fire!