Source: Variety / Getty
Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s mission to perpetuate misinformation isn’t just a disturbance on users’ social media timelines. It makes a real impact on people’s lives — and The Bear actress Ayo Edebiri says she has seen it firsthand.
The actress, who has won Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her role on the FX/Hulu series, made a post to her Instagram Stories this week revealing that she received “insane death threats” after Musk reshared a fake news report in February that said Edebiri was replacing Johnny Depp in a new film in the Pirates In The Caribbean franchise.
“Just remembering when I got some of the most insane death threats and racial slurs of my life (idk if it’s the #1 moment, but for sure top 3) for a fake reboot of a movie I had never even heard of because of this man,” Edebiri posted, alongside a screenshot of Musk’s post. “LMAO. So not only is he [a] double Sieg Heil-ing fascist, he’s an idiot but anyway.”
Musk reposted the fake story on Feb. 7 to his account on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he currently has 219.6 million followers. “Disney sucks,” he posted. While his own post is still on the site, the quoted story has since been deleted from the app.
Ayo Edebiri also shared a post to her Stories agreeing with recent comments from fellow actor and comedian Bill Burr, who spoke about Musk on an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air.
“I’m trying to get regular people to stop yelling at each other and realize that it’s a select few group of nerds eating raw almonds and doing their stupid workouts and competing with each other to have the biggest infinity pool and the rest of us are getting pushed down,” Burr said on NPR’s Fresh Air. “They’ve politicized the whole stupid thing and we’re falling for it.”
This isn’t the first time that Musk has been accused of spreading lies on the platform. Since acquiring the app in 2022 and renaming it to X, Musk has been labeled as a “one-man misinformation machine.” He replaced the platform’s previous moderation measures with the crowd-sourced “community notes” fact-checking system and laid off thousands of employees. A study released in November 2024 by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk had shared at least 87 posts last year that fact-checkers categorized as “false” or “misleading.” Topics included voter fraud, and claims that the Democrats were “importing voters.” He also donated a reported $288 million to the reelection campaign of Donald Trump, who used opposition to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices as a central part of his messaging. Such practices were designed to promote fair treatment of all people and to fight discrimination based on race, gender, and disability, but Trump labeled them as “illegal and immoral” upon being reelected to office.
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