Tale of Musk Rewarding Black Good Samaritan for Fixing His Mother’s Flat Tire Is Fiction [Video]

A rumor claims that billionaire and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk rewarded a “Black boy” named Michael after he helped his mother, Maye Musk, patch a flat tire on her Tesla Cybertruck. This claim circulated online in late November and early December 2024.

One reader emailed Snopes asking about the story and included a link to a YouTube video (archived). The Storytime With Falcao YouTube channel published the clip on Nov. 25. The video’s title read, “Black Boy Helps Elon Musk’s Mom with Flat Tire, Next Day He Gets The SHOCK of His Life!”

The more than 27-minute video tells the story of a 20-year-old Black man (not a “Black boy”) named Michael. In the story, Michael stops on his bicycle ride to assist an elderly woman in patching a flat tire on her Tesla Cybertruck. He tells the woman he studies engineering. Unbeknownst to Michael, the woman was Elon Musk’s mother, …