Those Jeff Bezos hair transplant photos are very fake

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They’re both famously bald, and that definitely hasn’t changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X, Threads, and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved look, which in Bezos’ case appears to be very freshly transplanted. It’s all just photo editing fakery, AI or otherwise.

It’s unclear how viral these posts are, but they’re prevalent enough that a few members of the Verge team have encountered them in their social media feeds. Some people who shared them claimed (or were seemingly fooled into believing) that Bezos and Statham had undergone hair transplant surgery. Generative AI tools have made this kind of photo manipulation or outright creation more accessible and convincing, and because AI labeling solutions on social media broadly suck at flagging this fakery, it’s easy to be misled unless you’re wary of everything you see online. In a world where social media shitposters can turn engagement into a revenue stream, they’re not going to stop churning out attention-grabbing fabricated nonsense anytime soon.

We don’t know if AI tools were used to make the follicled Bezos and Statham edits — none of the images I tested flagged for Content Credentials or SynthID markers. We also can’t fully establish when they were first posted or who made them, but they are definitely fake, and it only took me a couple of minutes to confirm it.

In both cases, I ran the photos through Google’s reverse image search tool. For the Bezos debunk, I found photographs of him in a similar background environment and wearing the exact same outfit (with, yes, no hair) that included a watermarked image credit at the bottom left. Searching for the credit then led me to the original photographs in their unaltered state, which were taken in 2023. Finding the original tressless images of Statham was even easier — the reverse image search immediately surfaced watermarked versions of the originals, which were snapped by a paparazzo in 2011.

There’s other evidence too if you know what to look for. The main flag is that it’s probably impossible for Bezos and Statham to be realistic candidates for hair replacement surgery anyway; it requires you to have enough “donor” hair to sacrifice from the back and sides of your head to then replant closer to your desired hairline. You can technically take it from other places (or even other people), but doing so is incredibly rare due to undesirable results and rejection concerns. Transplant patients also typically experience some pretty dramatic facial swelling for the first week or so, which Bezos shows no signs of. Wigs, toupees, and other hair systems can also be used as nonpermanent hair restoration solutions, but as someone who used to make and install them professionally, it would be an astounding whoopsie for someone as rich and connected as Bezos to go this route and still end up looking like a Chia Pet.

This isn’t the first time photo-manipulated fakery has fooled people across social media, and with ongoing generative AI advancements, it probably won’t be the last. Previous incidents gave us the viral swagged-out pope, and recent trends have seen paparazzi photographs of celebrities like Callum Turner, Harry Styles, and Noah Schnapp being manipulated to remove their shirts. These kinds of edits are typically designed to rack up likes, reposts, and other engagement — they play into our fascination with celebrities’ lives with fabricated situations that are just outlandish enough to be believable, grab our attention, and be shared around as the latest hot gossip by those who are fooled, or who simply don’t care to verify the facts.

If you’re ever unsure if there’s fakery afoot with images of famous faces, just remember that most of the convincing edits (AI or otherwise) are based on real photos that you can hunt down to verify the original source.

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• Jess Weatherbed