Musk spreads falsehoods among flurry of tweets about previous billpublished at 01:03 Greenwich Mean Time
Jake Horton & Mike Wendling
BBC Verify
Elon Musk went on a
tear on Wednesday, tweeting dozens of times about the earlier – now scuppered – proposed
spending bill.
The Tesla and SpaceX
boss is a fierce critic of US government spending, and Donald Trump has put him
in charge of a unit designed to cut waste.
But in his flurry of
messages about the bill, he got some basic facts wrong.
Musk claimed that the
bill meant members of Congress would get a 40% pay rise. The real figure was 3.8%.
Members of Congress get a salary of $174,000 per year.
Musk shared a
screenshot of one section of the proposal with the claim: “We’re funding
bioweapon labs in this bill!”
That was an
erroneous reference to funding for biomedical research facilities – not bioweapons
facilities, which are banned under an international treaty.
Musk also shot out
messages claiming the bill contained billions to fund a new sports stadium and
military aid to Ukraine.
Neither spending proposal was in the bill, although it
did contain a measure that would transfer a parcel of land to the city of
Washington DC, which might theoretically eventually result in a new home for
the Washington Commanders NFL team.