Fact Check: Musk Said SpaceX Working on Controlling Weather to Compete with NASA?

Claim:

SpaceX Founder Elon Musk said his company had been working for years on manipulating the weather to compete with NASA.

Rating:

Labeled Satire ( About this rating? )

A rumor that SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk claimed SpaceX had been working on a satellite that controls the weather circulated widely online. For example, the Facebook page America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) posted on Oct. 9, 2024:

Elon says SpaceX has been working for years on a satellite that manipulates weather events to "compete" with NASA.

(Facebook/America's Last Line of Defense)

Some readers seemed to interpret rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events, and at least 450 of them reshared the claim. However, there was no evidence that either NASA or SpaceX were seeking to control the weather in 2024.

Rather, the rumor about SpaceX's supposed program originated with ALLOD — a social media account that describes its output as being humorous or satirical in nature. Its main Facebook page states:

The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery. Nothing on this page is real.

The fictional story spread as conspiracy theories about the government's ability to control the weather spread online. These started after U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia, posted such a claim on X ( archived ), a lie that gained 43.5 million views as of this writing:

(X/@mtgreenee)

ALLOD has a history of making up stories for shares and comments, sometimes relying on artificial-intelligence (AI) writing software to do its storytelling.

Snopes has addressed similar satirical claims created by ALLOD in the past, including the assertion that Musk was suing Kathy Griffin and a rumor that the streaming service Disney+ had lost 23 million subscribers after it tried to "cancel" Musk.

For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.