Footage of Elon Musk Sacking Vijaya Gadde from Twitter? Find out the facts…

After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk quickly removed some key executives from the company, including chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. Vijaya Gadde is mainly known for leading the charge against permanently suspending Donald Trump’s official handle.

In this context, a viral video is making rounds claiming to be the scenes of business tycoon Elon Musk firing Vijay Gadde during a podcast. However, Factcrescendo found the video to be fabricated.

Social Media Posts

The viral video shows scenes of Vijaya Gadde accepting some of the failures, to which Musk replies that failure comes with a big penalty and announces her firing from Twitter. The host of the show looks on in amazement, as seen below.

“Elon Musk fires Twitter's Chief Legal Officer and Policy Chief, Vijaya Gadde, ON AIR! Gadde was the one who decided to ban former President Donald Trump's Twitter account.”

Facebook

Posts were viral on Twitter also.

And the video went viral on WhatsApp, too, among Sri Lankan users.

Here is the same clip on TikTok | Archived

Fact Check

We started our investigation by looking at the specific video frames using the Invid- We Verify tool, and reverse image search of these frames led to an episode of a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience.

The video was published on March 6, 2019, titled “Joe Rogan Experience #1258 - Jack Dorsey, Vijaya Gadde & Tim Pool,” and the person in a black overcoat wearing a red t-shirt is Joe Rogan.

Below is the first scene of Vijaya Gadde admitting that “I do think we have failed in a couple of ways, and I want to admit that….” can be seen from 26 minute 30-second mark onwards. Here she speaks about the lack of educating Twitter users about the policy violations and being more transparent about these policies on the platform, as seen below.

However, we can’t see Elon Musk at any point in these three and half hour podcasts, and it’s clear that the talk show took place over three years ago.

Apart from the podcast host Joe Rogan & Vijaya Gadde (1) other two seen in the video footage are co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey (2), and Tim Poole (3), who is a freelance journalist.

We did a reverse image from the viral clip to find out the original footage related to Elon Musk. This again led to a podcast from Joe Rogan Experience #1169, published on 7^th September 2018.

One of the instances where Elon Musk is seen in the viral clip can be seen in Joe Rogan’s interview with the business magnate at 38 minutes 58 seconds. The screen comparison from the two pins is shown below.

Therefore, it’s clear that the viral clip is created using scenes from two old podcasts of Joe Rogan Experience, where Vijaya Gadde and Elon Musk took part separately.

Viral Clip originated from a Danish Producer, known to make satirical edited clips

Also, the viral clip shows the text @damonimani handle. A keyword search yielded the original handle which had posted this edited clip, as seen here, which he titled as a parody clip. Damon Imani is a producer from Denmark, and we noticed many such satirical edits, such as this one of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on his Instagram handle

However, after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk fired four of the company's key executives as one of the first moves. More can be read here. Archived

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Conclusion

Even though Elon Musk had fired Vijaya Gadde and a few other top executives as one of his first moves after acquiring Twitter, Musk did not do it during a live talk show. The viral clip is created using scenes from two old podcasts of Joe Rogan Experience, where Vijaya Gadde and Elon Musk took part separately in 2019 and 2018, respectively.

Title:Footage of Elon Musk Sacking Vijaya Gadde from Twitter? Find out the facts…

Fact Check By: Kalana Krishantha

Result: Misleading