As the 51-year-old billionaire charges forth with a host of changes to the platform—much to the delight and chagrin of his devoted army of fans and detractors, respectively—he has been the subject of many a viral tweet over the past several weeks.

From QAnon enthusiasts speculating whether he shared a coded message, to his release of the “Twitter Files,” and his growing brood, Musk’s life has been amplified since his acquisition of Twitter.

The Tesla CEO is also the focus of a number of outlandish claims.

The Claim

On Tuesday, December 13, a Twitter user posted a tweet claiming that South African-born Musk was facing the possibility of deportation from the U.S.

“BREAKING: Prominent attorneys are investigating whether Elon Musk lied on his application for U.S. citizenship,” read the post. “If it shows that he lied anywhere on the application, its likely he could be stripped of his of U.S. citizenship and deported.”

The tweet, posted by the pro-Democrat account @ericareport, received more than 16,000 likes.

Similar versions of the message were posted by a number of other accounts on the platform, capturing varying degrees of engagement from other users.

The “prominent attorneys” in question were not identified in any of the posts.

The Facts

While Musk was born in South Africa, he has been based in the U.S. for decades, after briefly living in Canada from the age of 17. In a Twitter thread shared in June 2018, Musk wrote about arriving in North America with “$2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books.”

In a 2012 interview with internet entrepreneur Kevin Rose, Musk said living in the U.S. was a long-held ambition, explaining that “it always seemed like when there was cool technology or things happening, it was kind of in the United States. So, my goal as a kid was to get to America basically.”

He eventually transferred his studies from Ontario’s Queen’s University to the University of Pennsylvania, per Musk’s 2012 interview with Esquire. The entrepreneur revealed several years ago that he has roots in the U.S. through his mother.

“I’m half Canadian,” Musk tweeted during an online conversation back in February 2017. “My Mom was born in Regina. My grandfather (her Dad) was American, born in Minnesota.”

Per his 2018 Twitter thread, Musk would eventually move to California’s Silicon Valley to attend Stanford University graduate school, though he dropped out and started his company Zip2, which provided maps and business directories to online newspapers.

He founded the company in 1995 when he was 24 years old. In 1999, Zip2 was bought by Compaq, a computer manufacturer, for $307 million.

Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002, per a 2016 Snopes article. Musk took the oath at California’s Pomona Fairplex, in a ceremony he told Esquire was “actually very moving”.

While the recent claim about his immigration status has been shared on Twitter, no noted news outlets have reported that Musk is under any such investigation by attorneys regarding his citizenship.

The genesis of the claim may be a tweet from lawyer, comedian, and journalist Dean Obeidallah, who posted on October 31 that he planned to investigate Musk’s citizenship application.

Responding to one of Musk’s tweets, CNN and MSNBC contributor Obeidallah wrote: “As a lawyer I’m going to do research to see if @elonmusk in any way lied on his application for US citizenship.”

“I’ll be making a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request for his immigration application,” he continued. “If he lied anywhere on application we will move to strip him of US citizenship. Stay tuned.”

Obeidallah said in a follow-up tweet: “Just so everyone knows the facts, while I did make a FOIA request for Elon Musk’s immigration application he has to consent to the request before I can get the docs. If he consents, I will share the file. If he refuses to consent then we must ask: What is Elon hiding?!”

Newsweek has reached out to Erica Marsh and representatives of Musk for comment.

The Ruling

Unverified.

While the claim has had legs on social media, Newsweek found no independently verifiable information to support the allegation.

It is theoretically possible that attorneys are probing Musk’s citizenship, so Newsweek cannot rule the claim as definitively false. But we have so far seen no evidence to back this claim up, therefore it is unverified and should be treated with skepticism.

There is also no evidence presented by claimants to support the suggestion that Musk employed illegal means to obtain residence, as well as subsequent citizenship, in the U.S.

Further, Obeidallah, whose tweet appeared to spark the theory that there truly was an investigation afoot, admitted in a November 27 post that he was merely “trolling” at the time he suggested such a probe.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK