Authors
Vaibhav is a part of Newschecker’s English team, where he spots and debunks all kinds of misinformation, making the rounds on the internet. A Journalism graduate from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he holds an M.A degree in Philosophy and an M.Phil from Delhi University.
With Elon Musk taking over Twitter, many employees from the company have been fired, including CEO Parag Aggarwal and lead of Trust and Safety Legal Policy Vijaya Gadde who was responsible for Donald Trump’s ban from the platform. In light of these events a video claiming to show Elon Musk firing Vijaya Gadde from Twitter live on the Joe Rogan podcast is going viral on social media. Newschecker found these claims to be untrue.
In the video, Vijaya Gadde can be seen admitting that there have been certain failures from the company, to which Elon Musk replies that failure comes with a big penalty and proceeds to fire her.
The video has been shared on Twitter by user @AlageshChelliah along with the caption ‘Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde on Air, wow this is humiliation to the core, KARMA Comes back, as you give’.
Newschecker found similar claims on Twitter with similar captions.
Fact Check /Verification
We started our investigation by conducting a reverse image search on the key-frames of the video on Google to verify its authenticity and found a video on Youtube uploaded by the official account of Joe Rogan Podcast called Powerful JRE on 6th March, 2019 titled ‘Joe Rogan Experience #1258 – Jack Dorsey, Vijaya Gadde & Tim Pool’.
The video has been captioned ‘Jack Dorsey is a computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur who is co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. Vijaya Gadde serves as the global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety at Twitter. Tim Pool is an independent journalist.’
In the video, frames similar to the viral video can be seen. The portion of the viral video can be seen around the 26 minutes and 15 seconds of the video.
On checking the whole video we do not see Elon Musk anywhere.
We also conducted a keyword search on Google with the words “Vijaya Gadde on Joe Rogan podcast” and found that this was the only instance when Vijaya Gadde had made an appearance on the podcast.
To find out the source of the footage showing Elon Musk purportedly firing Gadde, we conducted a reverse image search of the key-frames on Google, and found a Youtube video uploaded by the official account of Joe Rogan Podcast called Powerful JRE on 7th September, 2018.
Frames similar to the viral video can be seen in the Youtube video. Vijaya Gadde was not present in this video either.
Newschecker found that video portion of the viral video has been used from these two videos, but we could not identify the audio portion of the second half of the video which shows Elon Musk saying “Failure comes with a big penalty. You’re fired.”
Upon conducting a keyword research on Google with the words “Elon Musk”, “Twitter takeover” we found a report by India Today uploaded on their website on 31st October, 2022 titled ‘Elon Musk fires entire Twitter board to become sole director’.
Musk immediately fired the company’s top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, after buying the business for a staggering $44 billion, the report stated.
Additionally, the Tesla CEO is said to have ordered a staff to update the site’s verification procedure by November 7 or they will be fired.
Conclusion
Newschecker’s investigation reveals that the video of Twitter owner Elon Musk firing policy chief Vijaya Gadde live on air on the Joe Rogan Podcast is edited.
Result: Altered Photo/Video
Our Sources
Youtube video by Powerful JRE on 6th March, 2019
Youtube video by Powerful JRE on 7th September, 2018
Report by India Today on 1st November, 2022
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Authors
Vaibhav is a part of Newschecker’s English team, where he spots and debunks all kinds of misinformation, making the rounds on the internet. A Journalism graduate from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he holds an M.A degree in Philosophy and an M.Phil from Delhi University.
