Maye Musk is very protective of her 50-year-old son Elon, the richest man in the world. She’s so protective, in fact, that late Thursday night she lashed out at a post on Twitter—the platform her son is currently in the process of buying for $44 billion—that claimed musician and actor Sky Ferreira turned down a date with Musk after his “team” approached her during the Met Gala this week.

“There was no team. I was with Elon. So, NO,” Maye Musk replied, adding an angry face emoji to really hammer her point home.

Maye Musk tweet

The problem for Mother Musk is that the account she was responding to was fake, and the entire thing appears to have been a hoax.

The account that posted the tweet had the username @newypost. Its display name was “New York Post” and it used the logo from the newspaper to make it seem like it was an official account. A fake Twitter post from an account pretending to be The New York Post, featuring photos of Elon Musk and Sky Ferreira.

A second tweet in the same thread suggested that Musk’s team had asked the organizers of the Met Gala to seat Ferreira next to the billionaire.

Tweet from the fake account, containing a photo of Musk and Ferreira seated at the same table.Twitter
There’s no evidence to support any of the claims the fake New York Post account made, but the tweets still racked up tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Early on Friday morning, the person running the account changed the display name to “Pop Crave” and replaced the profile picture with a pop-art image of Marlyn Monroe.

Then, just after 6 a.m. Friday morning, the account suddenly disappeared.

Despite several people responding to Maye Musk’s tweet to tell her the account was a hoax, her response remains on the platform. It seems that Musk’s mother might have been in the mood to take on major New York-based newspapers, as earlier on Thursday she lashed out at a New York Times article discussing Musk’s privileged upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa.

At the Met Gala, Musk told reporters about his plans for Twitter and his efforts to remove the bots and trolls and scams on the platforms. “I am definitely on the warpath,” Musk said on the red carpet. “If somebody is operating a bot and troll army, then I’m definitely their enemy.”

And as his mother has unintentionally proved, the Tesla CEO clearly has a lot of work to do.