Musk deleted ‘Vote red today!’ post after Democrats’ midterm gains

The Nov. 3 U.S. midterm elections saw major gains for Democrats both in the House and Senate, including key Senate victories in Michigan, South Carolina and Texas. News media outlets reported the results as a sweeping rebuke of President Donald Trump’s administration, with vote tallies exhibiting sizable differences from his second-term victory in 2024.

In the hours after the election results began coming in, some people began claiming a screen-recorded video showed that tech entrepreneur Elon Musk — who reportedly contributed $474 million to support Republicans in the midterms — had deleted his post from Election Day that read, “Vote red today!”

For example, one X user’s popular post featured the screen recording showing the post still loaded on the person’s device but not properly displaying after refreshing Musk’s feed. That clip appeared to originate from a different user, with many (archived) others (archived) reposting (archived) the content.

Others shared (archived) a screenshot with a message reading, “The post you are trying to reply to has been deleted or is not visible to you.”

(@PollTracker2024 via X)

In sum, Musk, or another person who manages his X account, truly deleted the post reading, “Vote red today!”

While knowledgeable users can create fake screenshots and videos, we found definitive proof that the post once existed. Someone archived the post prior to its removal. As of that archiving, the post had nearly 12 million views.

Attempts to access the original post displayed the message, “Hmm…this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.”

We also confirmed firsthand that DuckDuckGo search results still displayed a link to the deleted post, which we further archived.

(DuckDuckGo)

The DuckDuckGo search results displayed the time 14:35:34, appearing to correspond to GMT. That timing aligned with the post first appearing just after another one visible in the screen recording, in which Musk answered “Yes” in a quote repost of another user’s post (archived) about how to properly use artificial intelligence.

Snopes emailed an apparent media relations email address for X to ask whether Musk wished to comment about this matter. In the past, journalists’ correspondence sent via a similar email address did not result in receiving answers to questions. We will update this article if we receive more information.

For further reading, we previously investigated whether Musk paid Democratic U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan to endorse GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers.

Sources