Overnight, Tesla responded to the Wall Street Journal's decision to publish a story late on Wednesday about Elon Musk's future with the EV company--one that Tesla says the publication knew was fake news. In the story, the WSJ quotes anonymous sources allegedly "familiar with the discussions" that the company began a search in April for a CEO to replace Musk. But it was another media outlet's jumping on the story that is troubling. More on that later.

Tesla Board of Directors chair, Robyn Denholm, fired back in an X post:

Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company.

This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published).

The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.

 – Robyn Denholm

Here's a useful timeline of the late Wednesday events surrounding the story:

The post continued:

At 1:23 AM ET, Tesla responded stating the report "is absolutely false."

15 minutes later, @ElonMusk said there was "an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board."

The worst part?

WSJ's source was "according to people familiar with the discussions."

Why would WSJ report a market-moving headline on the 9th largest public company in the world after the board itself explicitly denied it?

Indeed, Musk did name and shame the publication in an outraged reaction post on his X account:

He wrote that the WSJ gave "an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS," by running what he termed "a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE," while "fail[ing] to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!"

We've previously written about Musk's planned scaling back of his duties with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and it's not the first time there's been fake news on him in recent days, as my colleague Bob Hoge wrote.

READ: 'Fake News': Karoline Leavitt Calls Report About Elon Musk 'Garbage'

Trump Responds to Reports That Elon Musk Is Stepping Back From DOGE: ‘So Unfair’

Oddly, this story also drew a reaction from the Office of the NYC Comptroller, Brad Lander, who writes in snarky X post that "[he] called for a lawsuit against @Tesla after their stock prices plummeted while @ElonMusk played fake president." He goes on to urge the board to "do the right thing now & remove Elon from his side job as CEO."

The capper, though, which I noted as troubling, was that CNN ran with the story last night, too, as their show "The Source" devoted over five minutes to a sit-down with WSJ reporter. Emily Glazer, on the breaking story she co-authored.

As you can watch yourself at the link above, the network's Jake Tapper also invited the panelists on his earlier program to talk about Musk stepping back from his WH role.

It would take all day of course to list all of the false or unresearched "journalism" that flailing CNN has tried to pass off as news over the years. Still, it's important to hold them to account, whenever the Democrats' media hangers-on and other allies try everything they can make nothingburger fake news like this into something. 

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