No, DOGE didn’t drop cash from a helicopter; video uses two older, unrelated clips

Is Elon Musk dropping dollars from a helicopter onto California residents?

Some social media videos would have you believe that Musk, who’s leading President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, is using savings from federal government cuts and giving it back to Americans in a most unusual way.

“Elon Musk is a man of his word. He’s contracted a helicopter and the first DOGE payments are being rained on California,” a narrator in a Feb. 23 Facebook video said.

The video has text that said, “It rained money on a busy highway,” “Raining Cash!” and “California!” It shows a helicopter dropping bills from a large container onto a crowd of people in a field below. Then the scene shifts to a highway where people gather bills amid parked cars and trucks. Some celebrate and show off their stash for the camera, but there is no sound.

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But there has been no official word that Trump’s administration will return money saved by DOGE back to taxpayers, much less in a game-show like fashion from a helicopter. 

And upon a closer look, the video is an edited version of two videos taken before DOGE was even a gleam in Trump’s or Musk’s eyes.

(Screenshot from Facebook)

Trump floated a proposal to give a dividend of 20% from DOGE savings — or $5,000 if it reaches its target of $2 trillion in savings — to taxpayers. How much taxpayer money DOGE is saving is not clear. PolitiFact reported Feb. 21 that DOGE’s website touted $55 billion in savings, but its “wall of receipts” total about $8.6 billion. So far, no money has been returned to taxpayers.

We also wondered why the first batch of millions would go to California. Trump and Musk have publicly feuded with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom after deadly wildfires there last month.

Using a reverse image search, we found the Facebook post used real video footage, but both predate the existence of DOGE. 

• One was from October 2023 when a Czech Republic TV personality dropped $1 million from a helicopter onto his fans in a field below.

• The second was from November 2021, when a highway crash in Carlsbad, California, involving an armored truck resulted in some drivers excitedly scooping up scattered cash on the road.

The Facebook post took video from a Feb. 20 TikTok post, which also misrepresented what happened by combining the same two videos, although it didn’t mention Musk or DOGE.

The Czech TV personality Kazma Kazmitch, whose real name is Kazma Bartošek, shared the money drop on his social media pages. The Facebook post claiming these were DOGE dollars shared images of that helicopter and the people in the field below.

The Facebook post also shared part of a video shared by an Instagram user Nov. 19, 2021, after an accident on the 5 Freeway in Carlsbad. Several people seen holding the money in the 2021 video are also seen in the Facebook video.

A Facebook post that said a video shows Musk dropping cash from a helicopter in California uses clips of two separate older videos. It’s Pants on Fire!