Is it true that the song “At Dawn” by the Alliance group was played at the Tesla event in the USA?

In mid-April 2023, a video of Elon Musk at one of his company’s events, where the Russian-language song “At Dawn” was allegedly played for the public, spread across social networks. We decided to check if it was a fake.

According to numerous posts on social networks, the video shows Tesla employees having fun to the song of the Alliance group, founded in the USSR. At the same time, “Verified” found several versions of where the recording was made: either on factory, or on opening new auto show in the USA. In addition, the authors of some publications accompany video with humorous comments that Elon Musk is a “Kremlin agent.” In the Telegram channel "Uncle Slava"(149,000 views at the time of writing this text) wrote that the billionaire "as always, demonstrates his independence from all Russophobic elements."

Similar posts also appeared in the channels “Observer"(193,000 views), Voblya (153,000), "Bullet"(149,000), "Sheikh Tamir" (146,000), "Yakov Kedmi"(100,000), "Bottle"(97,000), "Ostashko! Important"(95,000), Fox News Russia (90,000), "Alexander Semchenko"(89,000), "Cartridge"(80,000), Putin TG Team (twice: 76,000 And 69,000), "Petya the First" (70,000), "First patriotic" (65,000) and "Boiling water"(56,000). The video was also distributed on VKontakte (examples here, here, here, here And here), Twitter (here, here, here, here And here), TikTok (here, here, here And here) And some sites.

“Verified” did not find any news items in authoritative foreign media that the composition “At Dawn” was played in American factories or Tesla showrooms. Using reverse search Based on pictures in Yandex, we found out that the event shown on the video distributed in April 2023 occurred on March 22, 2022. On that day took place grand opening Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg - Tesla plant in Grünheide near Berlin. In addition to Musk, at the event was present and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In honor of the opening, the billionaire personally passed on 30 clients received keys to the first Tesla Model Y cars assembled in Germany.

The full video, an excerpt of which went viral on the RuNet, lasts just over 10 minutes. It appeared on the TeslaRalf YouTube channel on March 23, 2022. According to the video description, an eyewitness filmed Musk handing over the first five cars to the lucky owners. The fragment we are interested in begins at the mark 6:44 and ends with 6:53, while in the viral video the visuals were cropped and a fragment of another video was added there (we are talking about the last four seconds). At that moment, what was playing in the background was not the song “At Dawn”, but the composition Walking On Water by the American musical duo The Knocks and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. In general, for the entire 10 minutes of the running time, not a single Russian track was included, but I'm In Love With My Car by Queen, What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, You & Me by the duo Disclosure and Eliza Doolittle, as well as The Way I Am by Eminem were also used.

In the process of searching for the original source of the fake video, we came across publications that reported that the video was allegedly recorded by a Russian-speaking Tesla employee. For example, they wrote about this in the Telegram channel “Gossip Chronicles"(65,000 views) and blog IA Regnum on the Zen platform (97,000). However, the earliest record appeared on VKontakte in the public page “The Wrong Side of Show Business” (37,000 views) April 12, 2023 at 20:27 Moscow time. Below is the full text.

At Elon Musk’s plant, they listen to our Russian song “At the Dawn of 2020” by Sergei Arutyunov before the start of the work shift. “I work at the Tesla factory. I’m a simple engineer, so I don’t boast too much, but still seeing Musk is not such an event for me. Sometimes he receives us personally in his office - the guy is as open and simple as possible. The story is this: I was already accustomed to the “non-native” speech (my wife too), but I was pretty shocked when at the next morning meeting, instead of the traditional corporate anthem, “At the Dawn of 2020” by Sergei Arutyunov was played. Besides me, there are only a couple of other Russian speakers, so it’s unlikely that Musk chose her out of love for us. Foreigners don’t understand a damn thing, but they have a lot of fun. And we, from the CIS, are just enjoying ourselves almost every day now. Asking Musk personally what we did to deserve such a morning get-together a la Russe seems indecent - he’s not my friend after all. I’ve been tormented by intrigue for a long time now and at the same time I’m glad that our Sergei Arutyunov is listened to even so far abroad. Things like this, this kind of insider information is good for you. But here’s a video I filmed secretly!”

“At Dawn” - song by the group “Alliance”, released in 1987. The author of the music and text was Oleg Parastaev, deceased June 20, 2020. A couple of months before his death, he, together with Sergei Arutyunov, recorded a new version of the song - “At the Dawn of 2020” - and took off clip.

Apparently, Arutyunov’s PR team is responsible for creating the fake news. The original post with the "Tesla employee" quote has the author tagged - Olga Bubnenkova. In the description of her profile on VKontakte it is written that she works PR woman, and among her subscriptions is a community called “Sergey Arutyunov”, in which she is listed among the administrators with the note “PR, concerts”. Moreover, on April 15 Arutyunov recorded video in which he said that he was aware of his song’s “appearance” at the Tesla event and was proud of it.

[Over] the last couple of days, I have received a bunch of links where our song “At the Dawn of 2020” with Oleg Parastaev is heard at the Tesla plant. Well, cool! I listened - it’s really our song, it’s really my voice. And in general, it’s nice and proud for us, who made it, and for you, who listens to and supports it. Well, of course: “How do you like this, Elon Musk?” Yours Sergey Arutyunov.

In addition to the fake quote about the fake video, the original post contains a screenshot of an alleged video call from a certain person to Musk - this is Sergei Arutyunov.

A situation in which a musician did not know that his own PR agents were creating a fake with his participation seems unlikely, but it still cannot be 100% ruled out.

Cover photo: collage “Verified” (screenshots of YouTube channel videos “Oleg Parastaev", Skynamic And Agent game show)

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Is it true that Elon Musk sent obscene words to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Twitter?
2. Is it true that the singer Monetochka gave the Russians an ultimatum: “Either me or Putin”?
3. Is it true that singer Madonna made a video in which she chewed and spat out the flag of Ukraine?