President Donald Trump hosted a lavish state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday, where several U.S. oligarchs showed up to kiss the ring. Photos from the event have been circulating widely on social media, including shots of Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and billionaire Elon Musk.
But there’s one photo that has gotten a lot of attention Friday morning, and it definitely stands out for being weird.
The photo appears to show Donald Trump giving a toast in the background, at a table with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, First Lady Melania Trump, and Xi Jinping, among others. Elon Musk is seen on the far left, appearing to balance silverware on his finger, as you can see above.
You may recall that footage of Musk doing something similar went viral last year. At that time, Musk was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump and looked absolutely blitzed out of his mind. It was March 2025, and the Tesla CEO had started taking a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and apparently thought it was cool to balance utensils on his fingers.
Musk playing with his silverware while tripping on ketamine at Bedminster.pic.twitter.com/2nvI7Wzuri
— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) March 22, 2025
But something about this new photo from last night isn’t quite right. Take a look at Musk’s expression. Sure, he always looks like a dipshit. But his face looks more plastic than usual.
And take a glance at Tim Cook on the other side of the table. His face has been warped in some really weird way.
Is this image AI? We asked Musk’s chatbot Grok.
“Yes, the photo is real,” Grok told us. “It shows the head table at the official White House state dinner held on September 24, 2026, hosted by President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for Chinese President Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan in the East Room.”
We specifically asked what Musk was doing in the photo. Grok replied: “Elon Musk is seated at the head table, holding a spoon (and possibly a fork) up near his face with his right hand while looking toward the center of the table / the toast happening between Melania Trump and Xi Jinping.”
Musk isn’t at the head of the table. But Grok wasn’t finished yet. The chatbot continued: “He is wearing a black tuxedo with a black bow tie, appears relaxed and engaged in the moment, and is positioned next to Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO). This matches the official seating at the September 24, 2026, White House state dinner.”
Engaged in the moment? We were intrigued by what Grok would say if probed further so we asked why he was holding his silverware like that. Grok replied, “He’s simply holding the spoon (and fork) up near his face in a casual, mid-gesture way while seated at the table.”
We asked one last time if the photo is real. Grok responded, “Yes, I’m sure it’s real,” emphasizing that “there’s no indication it’s AI-generated or manipulated—the people, clothing, room, and moment all line up with the documented event.”
To be clear, it’s not real. The image is fake as hell. The real image was taken by photographer Kevin Dietsch for Getty Images. You can see the unaltered version below.
When we asked other chatbots, OpenAI’s ChatGPT spotted the altered version as fake. Microsoft Copilot said there wasn’t enough evidence to say either way. Google’s Gemini replied that it wasn’t an authentic photo, calling out Musk in particular as evidence it’s fake: “Elon Musk is holding a fork and spoon together awkwardly in one hand, with the tines and bowl appearing warped and fused.”
Grok can’t tell the difference between a real photo and a fake one, despite the real one being widely available online. But that should come as no surprise, given the chatbot’s history of praising Adolf Hitler and insisting that Musk is smarter than Albert Einstein and more fit than LeBron James.
Another image that’s clearly fake has also been doing the rounds. Trump is seen pointing at the camera while Xi holds a glass of wine and Musk appears to be holding a glass of whiskey or some other liquor. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is even cuddled up next to Musk, a very unlikely situation.
It’s so obviously fake. But it was apparently real enough to trick Mike Waltz, the man who infamously invited a journalist into a Signal group chat while discussing sensitive national security information last year. At the time, Waltz was National Security Advisor and was ultimately pushed aside to become the ambassador to the UN.
“Only @POTUS could pull this group together. Photo of the year,” Waltz tweeted. Waltz has since deleted his tweet.
Neither viral photo has a community note indicating that they’re fake at the time of writing. But hopefully that gets corrected soon. Because when a top U.S. official is fooled by an obviously AI image, that’s really bad news. These are, after all, the people with tremendous power over our lives, to say nothing of the nuclear codes.
And there are plenty of real images to choose from if you want to illustrate what was happening last night. Take the photo below, for example, where Musk is standing near Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
No, it hasn’t been altered. Musk really does look like Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head sometimes.
