Elon Musk and Trump Jr. repost fake E! News video about USAID created by pro-Kremlin disinformation network

Billionaire Elon Musk and U.S. first son Donald Trump Jr. have both shared a video on X that was originally posted by Russia’s Matryoshka disinformation network, according to the independent outlets Agentstvo and Holod, and the tracking project Bot Blocker.

Musk was the first to share the video, which claimed that after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded trips to Ukraine for celebrities including Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Orlando Bloom, and Ben Stiller.

Donald Trump Jr. later reposted the same video, writing that “USAID might turn out to be the biggest fraud ever committed against the American people under the guise of good deeds.”

The video itself is a fabricated clip designed to mimic a segment from the U.S. outlet E! News, Agentstvo Media reported. It falsely claims that Jolie received $20 million for her trip to Ukraine, Bloom $8 million, Penn $5 million, Stiller $4 million, and Van Damme $1.5 million. According to the video, this money was allegedly paid to “boost Zelensky’s popularity with foreign audiences, especially in the U.S.”

Investigative journalist Bill McCarty reported that E! News denied any involvement in the video’s creation. Stiller called the video “lies coming from Russian media,” adding: “I completely self-funded my humanitarian trip to Ukraine. There was no funding from USAID and certainly no payment of any kind.”

The post featuring the video garnered over 3.8 million views in total. A representative from Bot Blocker told Agentstvo that the clip is part of a Kremlin bot campaign targeting USAID. Other similar videos have claimed that USAID spent large amounts of money on online disinformation and controlled “biolabs” in Ukraine, according to Agentstvo.