Elon Musk, Jared Kushner at World Cup in Qatar

On December 18 2022, a photograph purportedly showing Twitter’s new chief executive officer Elon Musk with Jared Kushner at the World Cup was shared to r/pics, later rising to the top spot on r/all:

Kushner served as a senior advisor to former United States President Donald Trump, and is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

That submission did not link to an article or other contextual information about the photograph, but it (and another like it) was shared to Imgur at least three times:

On Twitter, Musk tweeted at least eight times about the World Cup on December 18 2022. In the first tweet, Musk indicated he was in attendance:

One popular reply included the photograph shared to Reddit, and invoked the “this you?” meme:

KnowYourMeme.com’s entry on “This You?” explained that it served as “a catchphrase used on Twitter to call out the hypocrisy of a certain tweet with a screenshot of a past tweet.” In another popular tweet, former Trump associate and attorney Michael Cohen weighed in:

Cohen retweeted a comment about how a “picture is worth a thousand words,” commenting “More like 2 billion!” Cohen was referencing Kushner’s controversial receipt of a $2 billion investment not long after the end of the Trump administration:

Six months after leaving the White House [in 2021], Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30 [2021].

But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

A comment on a brief Times of Israel item about the photograph questioned its legitimacy:

So these images of musk and Kushner

So the photographer states he did not take photo

I assume it’s fake then and used to ignite the flames of hate against these two

However, a similar image appeared in the New York Times, alongside a December 18 2022 article about Musk’s management of Twitter. It was captioned:

Elon Musk, center, was photographed with Jared Kushner, left, at the World Cup final in Qatar on Sunday [December 18 2022]. Later that day, Mr. Musk asked his Twitter followers to decide whether he should remain as head of the social media service.

On December 18 2022, photographs of Elon Musk and Jared Kushner at the World Cup in Qatar began circulating. The images were real and unaltered, as well as correctly captioned.