Elon Musk has once again taken aim against the Biden administration, claiming this time that they 'slaughtered' 150,000,000 egg-laying chickens, implying this to be the cause of soaring egg prices.
The high price of eggs was one of the biggest talking points prior to the election, and many believe that it played a key role in Donald Trump regaining the presidency.
Eggs saw a peak price of around $4.25 two months prior to the election according to Trading Economics, and many believed that Trump's victory would see their price return to the lows of mid-2023.
However, they have since soared well beyond any previous record in the past 10 years at least, reaching a peak price-per-dozen of around $8.11 this month after climbing rapidly since the election.
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This has caused a new talking point in right wing circles that blames the Biden administration by linking them to the death of 150 million chickens. This has been parroted by Elon Musk on his social media channels, where he claims that the accusations are "true" and linked to the increase in prices.
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"There was an insane slaughter of 150 million egg-laying chickens ordered by the Biden administration," outlines Musk in a recent post on X, and while this is technically true, it's for a very different reason.
As reported by Forbes, this mass 'slaughter' of chickens was in line with a 'stamping-out policy' advised by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which indicates that the only way to deal with highly pathogenic avian flu is to depopulate affected and exposed poultry.
These efforts began in February 2022 after a bird flu outbreak and have continued into Trump's presidency, with an estimated 13 million chickens killed since February alone.
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It also remains true that this is linked to the rise in egg prices, with recent USDA estimates indicating that egg prices will continue to rise by 41% in 2025. However, with these efforts remaining in place during the Trump administration, it's not quite the slam dunk that Musk is positioning it to be.
With egg prices likely to continue their worrying rise, it's likely that Musk and other right wing commenters will try to deflect from the same talking points that benefitted them greatly during the last election cycle, despite the surge being for the very same reasons.
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One intriguing contradiction is that Musk's own AI-powered chatbot Grok is repeatedly correcting his claim in the replies, outlining to users looking for fact checks that the 'slaughter' was due to the spread of bird flu. This is linked to previous Grok claims that Musk is a 'significant spreader' of misinformation, so it seems like even his own tools have turned against him.
Musk has indicated that the Biden administration was "extremely antagonistic" towards him and his companies after a Biden-era lawsuit against SpaceX was dropped by the current Department of Justice, and has repeatedly insinuated that the previous government is to blame for the two stranded astronauts currently on the International Space Station.