Elon Musk calls for accountability in media, donates to PolitiFact

Elon Musk is a new member of PolitiFact’s Truth Squad.

Here’s how it all went down:

Frustrated with an article about Tesla, entrepreneur Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal) had an idea May 23: He’d “create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication.”

Many Twitter users went on to reply to Musk’s tweet mentioning PolitiFact. Mark Boyle said, “It’s great that @elonmusk is interested in supporting reality checks amid the #fakenews crisis, but crowdsourcing may not be the best way to do it. Supporting orgs like @snopes and @PolitiFact would be a better way to go.”

We also believe in holding people accountable to their words. We use scorecards for various politicians and pundits to track their claims over time. So we let him know.

Musk, turns out, is all about PolitiFact.

He even donated.

He used this link to donate to PolitiFact (we named it after him.) http://bit.ly/politifactelon

It’s housed by Poynter.org, our owner, a non-profit school for journalists.

Interested in learning more about PolitiFact’s mission and ways to help? Become a member of the Truth Squad! We are mainly supported by small contributions from readers who care.