In mid-March 2025, an X user posted (archived) that U.S. President Donald Trump's adviser, Elon Musk, "amplified" another user's post that displayed an image reading, "Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn't murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did." Readers also emailed Snopes to ask if Musk truly reposted the post.

A review of Musk's X activity found that on March 13, 2025, he truly reposted the thought saying that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Communist China's founding leader Mao Zedong and German dictator and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler didn't murder millions of people, and that "public sector workers did." In other words, the repost genuinely existed, and no one doctored the screenshot with any image-editing tools. He later removed the repost on or following March 14.

Specifically, Musk used the repost function on X, previously known as a retweet in past years on Twitter, to share another user's post. That other user's post featured a screenshot of a different person's post (archived) about Stalin, Mao and Hitler, tweeted years before on Jan. 30, 2019.