Did JD Vance really criticise Elon Musk for making him ‘look bad’ in ‘leaked’ audio?

Tesla owner and Doge boss Elon Musk’s close ties to Donald Trump and the US government has, at times, been a difficult subject for the Republican – as he’s previously insisted the billionaire is “not going to be president” while social media users branded him “President Musk”, and fumed at Time Magazine after they published a cover of Musk sitting behind his Resolute desk.

Now, “leaked” audio claiming to be of vice president JD Vance is circulating online as a voice is heard saying that Musk is “making me look bad” – but is it legitimate?

The transcript of the garbled speech is as follows: “Everything that he’s doing is getting criticised in the media, and he’s saying he’s helping, and he’s not. He’s making us look bad – he’s making me look bad.

“And I’ll tell you this, and he wouldn’t like it if I said it: but he’s not … he is from South Africa, and he’s cosplaying as this great American leader in a room that has the portraits of some of the greatest men that ever ran this country, and he has the audacity to act like he is an elected official.

“I am an elected official. I am an important one in this situation, not him.

“So if he wants to tank the economy and his cars, maybe that’s what he deserves.”

Vance doesn’t strike us as the kind of guy who would use the word “cosplay”, and whether you agree with us or not, the audio is fake.

The VP’s own director of communications, William Martin, shared a version of the audio – since deleted – on his Twitter/X account and added: “This audio is 100% fake and most certainly not the Vice President.”

And if that isn’t enough, Maarten Schenk over at Lead Stories ran the audio through a number of AI deepfake tools, with one giving it an authenticity score of just nine out of 100.

They also used seven additional AI detectors, which gave results as to how likely it was to be AI-generated ranging from 66.1 per cent all the way up to 100 per cent (three of them came back with the latter percentage).

Yet many social media accounts have seized on the possibility that Vance may not be all that friendly towards Musk, with one Twitter/X user having more than 16,000 likes on his tweet promoting the fake audio:

Another tweet with the same audio, but different graphics, has racked up more than 2,500 likes:

Vance has since commented on the viral footage himself, responding to Talbert Swan's tweet to say it is a "fake AI-generated clip" and question whether Swan "has the integrity to delete [the clip] now that he knows it's false".

"If not, it could be defamation. I guess we'll find out," he wrote.

However, all of this isn’t to say that the VP hasn’t been critical of Musk in comments which are public and verifiable, as just over a week ago the vice president gave an interview to NBC News in which he talked about the Doge boss’s mistakes.

“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” he said.

Why not read…

• JD Vance's 'shocking' comments on Greenland resurface
• Elon Musk is being a ‘free speech absolutist’ again - by suspending Twitter/X accounts in Turkey

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