A rumor that circulated online in May 2025 claimed the Green Bay Packers rejected an advertisement for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company at the team’s historic Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Snopes received email from readers asking about the rumor. One reader inquired, “Is the claim that the Packers rejected a Tesla ad the truth?” Another reader asked, “Is there any validity to the claim that the Green Bay Packers rejected Elon Musk’s Tesla ad at Lambeau Field?”
On May 11, a Facebook page named Green and Gold Legacy posted (archived), “HOLY S***: Green Bay Packers Reject Elon Musk’s Tesla Ad at Lambeau Field! Packers Give Elon Musk a Very Good Reason for Rejection…”
(Green and Gold Legacy/Facebook)
That post and several others each included page manager comments that linked to articles hosted on generic-looking WordPress blogs. For instance, the Green and Gold Legacy page displayed a link to an article on the blog tintinhthanh.online. The story reported the Packers supposedly rejected the offer because they believed “associating with Tesla at Lambeau Field did not align with their core values or the expectations of their deeply loyal fanbase.” The article also cited the Packers’ alleged concerns about the safety of Tesla vehicles.
However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo and Google found no news media outlets reporting on this matter. Rather, the story of the Packers rejecting a Tesla ad — or being offered the chance to promote any such ad in the first place — was false.
A representative for the Packers communications team had not yet responded to a request for comment by publication time.
Digging for the truth about the Packers/Musk rumor
Much like the posts promoting the false claim about the Packers, posts from similar Facebook pages claimed other NFL teams also rejected Musk’s Tesla ad, including the Buffalo Bills, Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys. Additionally, Facebook pages promoted the rumor about rejecting Musk’s ad for leagues other than the NFL, including the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets, MLB’s Detroit Tigers and NCAA college football’s Ohio State Buckeyes. In other words, the people promoting such rumors simply created posts for numerous teams to increase their chances of one of the posts taking off and virally spreading.
The posts promoting the rumor each included a link in the first comment leading to an article on an ad-filled blog. Scans of the tintinhthanh.online article with the artificial intelligence-detection websites Copyleaks, QuillBot and ZeroGPT concluded it was extremely likely that someone generated the text using one or more AI tools.
People in countries outside the U.S. target Americans with false rumors such as these with the goal of making money, specifically seeking to earn advertising revenue from the generic-looking WordPress blogs that host the articles featured in the Facebook comments. For example, the page transparency tab for the Green and Gold Legacy Facebook page lists its manager as residing in Vietnam, and the tintinhthanh.online website displays numerous ads in several different placements on its pages.
The Facebook page managers possibly also seek to build up their social media follower count with the promotion of inauthentic content in order to one day sell the pages for additional revenue.
For further reading, a previous fact check examined another false rumor originating from the same kind of inauthentic sports-focused Facebook pages alleging the NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL or other organizations fired referees for bribery or other misconduct.
