Fact-Check: No, Elon Musk Did Not Fire Ex-Twitter Executive Vijaya Gadde on Air
Elon Musk and Vijaya Gadde have not appeared together on Joe Rogan's podcasts and both the videos are old.
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A video of Twitter CEO Elon Musk purportedly firing former platform legal affairs and policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, on American commentator Joe Rogan's podcast is being shared on social media to claim that Musk fired her on air after taking over the microblogging platform.
In the clip, Gadde can be heard talking about failing "in a couple of ways," to which Musk responds, "Failure has a big penalty, you're fired."
(Archives of more claims can be seen here and here.)
However, we found that the video has been edited. Gadde and Musk haven't appeared on Rogan's podcast together.
The clips are from two different videos from Rogan's verified YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, and the audio of Musk talking about the penalty for failure is taken from a United States Air Force (USAF) Air Warfare Symposium, where he was talking about his company, Space X.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We looked for videos of the duo on Rogan's verified YouTube channel and didn't find any episode where the two have appeared together. Moreover the two haven't been guests on the podcast for at least the last two years.
VIDEO 1: VIJAYA GADDE
We found one video with Gadde, one of Twitter's founders Jack Dorsey, and YouTuber and journalist Tim Pool. This video was streamed live on 6 March 2019, whereas Musk officially took over Twitter on 27 October.
The video was uploaded in 2019.
(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
We compared the screenshots from both videos and saw that this viral clip was taken from this episode of the podcast.
The first half of the claim was taken from this video.
(Source: Facebook/YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
26 minutes and 31 seconds into this video, we found Gadde's statement about Twitter having failed in a couple of ways and wanting to admit that.
However, she made this statement while answering a question about Twitter's policies of suspending accounts and taking down tweets that violated the platform's community guidelines.
VIDEO 2: ELON MUSK
Elon Musk has made two appearances on Joe Rogan's podcast. The first time was on 7 September 2018, while the second one was on 7 May 2020.
Here, we saw that the visuals in the viral claim were taken from Musk's first appearance on the podcast in 2018, as a comparison of screenshots from both videos showed him in the same T-shirt.
Musk is seen wearing the same T-shirt in both screenshots.
(Source: Facebook/YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
We went through both these podcasts, but did not find Musk making any such statement as heard in the viral clip.
WHERE IS MUSK'S AUDIO FROM?
Using the advanced keyword search on Google, we came across an article dated 29 February 2020 on InShorts, a news aggregator.
Taking a cue from this, we looked for a video and came across his full interview on the US military's media hosting website DVIDS Hub.
On going through the video we found that around 52 minutes and 40 seconds into the interview, he makes the same remark as heard in the viral clip.
Here, Musk is heard speaking about the work culture at SpaceX and saying, "Failure to try to innovate at all, comes with a big penalty. You'll be fired."
Evidently, two old, separate videos from Joe Rogan's podcast – and audio of Musk speaking in an unrelated interview – were edited together to claim that he had fired ex-Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde on air after taking over the company.
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