Are ‘prominent lawyers’ investigating whether Elon Musk lied when applying for US citizenship?

On May 24, 2023, a tweet from a pro-democracy account with over 100,000 followers and a history disinformation claimed that a “breaking” report suggested that “prominent lawyers” were working to see if Elon Musk had lied on his US citizenship application:

The fact that @ericareport posted this same tweet in December 2022 deals a blow to the claim that the May 2023 tweet contained “breaking” information. The fact that the text appearing in this account’s tweet appears to have been cut and pasted from earlier identical tweets and a Reddit thread on the subject is an added blow.

As noted in a December 2022 Newsweek fact check on this claim, the language of the @ericareports tweet sounds suspiciously like a Tweet from October 2022 from “lawyer, comedian and journalist” Dean Obeidallah:

As a lawyer, I will do some research to see if [Elon Musk] lied in any way on his application for U.S. citizenship. […]. If he lied anywhere on the application, we will strip him of US citizenship.

Several publications, including Daily Mail, Fox News and Western Journal, took the claim seriously. Hours later, however, Obeidallah – who could perhaps be considered a “prominent lawyer” – tweeted that “it was never about the document. It was just trolling”. .

Newsweek “could not find any independently verifiable information” supporting the allegation that Musk was under investigation over immigration matters, adding that “the ‘prominent lawyers’ in question were not identified in none of the messages”.

Snopes had not identified any information that could help with this verification, at the time of this report. Unverified or unverifiable rumors about his US citizenship have long been thrown at Musk, as Snopes has previously reported.

Because, however, this claim comes from unsourced copypasta from a claim made in a tweet described as a “troll”, we rate this claim as “Originated as Satire”.

Sources