Drake’s Lost Slide Keeps Popping Up In Viral Posts. Are They Real?

The saga with Drake’s viral drone footage continues. A video showing the rapper hurling a bright orange slide at a drone garnered millions of views last week. Now multiple social media posts claiming to have found the lost slider have gone viral. But are they real?

Before we get into it, let’s roll the tape back. Here’s how we got here.

The original drone footage of Drake hit social media last week. It was the perfect combination of funny, silly and bizarre — and it had one of the biggest rappers in it.

In the clip, which instantly went viral, Drake spots a drone flying in the balcony of his Sydney penthouse, located in the luxurious Crown Towers hotel. The rapper picks up a bright orange slipper and tosses it at the drone. The shot misses its target — by a lot. The drone then flies up and away, offering a cinematic view of the Crown Towers.

The video became the topic of heated debate online, with social media posters speculating it appeared to be staged. What led people to that conclusion was a shot of a laptop showing a gambling site at the beginning of the video; also visible was the shadow of another person seen in the window reflections, which many alleged was the drone pilot himself.

Drake, of course, has long had an ongoing brand deal with gambling service Stake. Although Stake’s logo wasn’t present in the video, social media posters quickly began linking it back to the gambling service. I asked Stake about the video last week, but I’ve not heard back.

As I explained in another piece, though, the video also had an oddly choreographed feel to it, bearing a peculiar resemblance to a notorious, now-banned account known for posting clips aggressively harassing unhoused people in the streets of Pueblo, Colorado.

This is where things start getting even more ludicrous.

Drake’s Supposed Orange Slide Surfaces In New Viral Posts

A few days after the viral drone footage went viral, Sydney Water — a state-owned corporation providing drinking water — posted a video on its Instagram account, claiming to have found Drake’s lost slide.

In the video, taken from the Barangaroo Reserve located nearby Crown Towers, a Sydney Water rep zooms out from the luxurious hotel to point the camera at an orange slide — resembling that of Drake — conveniently washed up on the bay.

“Hey Drake, this yours,” Sydney Water asked in the caption. “Hope you’re enjoying our beautiful city — but let’s keep it that way, yeah?”

“Feel free to swing by our Parramatta office to pick it up,” it continued, tongue-in-cheek. “We’ll even chuck in a Warragamba Slammer bottle.”

Sydney Water then tagged Crown Towers’ account in the comments, asking if the hotel could “pass on a message to a Mr. Drizzy.” Soon enough, Uber Australia had also joined in on the fun in the comments, offering to deliver the lost slide “to its rightful owner via Uber Package.”

Sydney Water’s post is undeniably a master class in corporate social media management. It capitalizes on an already viral video featuring a massive celebrity. It’s local, yet global. The caption has the right, playful tone to resonate with people. It throws in a little promo for its own product, but in a cool, nonchalant way. It even succeeds in drawing in other brands to hop in on the goof.

It’s no surprise the post has racked up over 218,000 likes and 1,750 comments as of the time of writing of this piece.

But upon closer scrutiny, Sydney Water’s narrative doesn’t quite line up with original drone footage.

For starters, the drone is hovering rather low in Drake’s penthouse, when the rapper chucks the slide at it.

The drone then soars up quite a bit, before it eventually flies away from the Crown Towers, revealing the penthouse has rather tall windows surrounding the balcony.

It’s difficult to calculate the upward trajectory of the slide, but it doesn’t seem likely it would’ve made it past the windows.

The direction of the slide toss doesn’t seem to coincide with the location where Sydney Water supposedly found it, either.

As you can see, the Barangaroo Reserve is on the right side of the hotel in the Google Maps satellite image below, while the drone is flying downwards (as seen on the satellite image).

That’s evident when we align a wide angle shot from the original drone footage with a Google Maps satellite image. For convenience, I’ve rotated the satellite view to match the viewpoint of the drone footage; I’ve also pinpointed Sydney’s White Bay and Barangaroo Reserve for reference.

Judging by those images, even if the slide got over the rather tall windows, it would’ve likely flown in the direction of land — not water.

Now, that’s all fine — and arguably Sydney Water is merely having fun with an already silly situation.

But the video has since spread beyond Sydney Water’s Instagram with multiple accounts reposting it on other platforms, stacking millions of views and thousands of likes and further perpetuating Sydney Water’s dubious claims.

“They found the slide Drake threw at the drone,” reads one such post, which has amassed over 8 million views and 70,000 likes at the time of writing.

The poster, @FearedBuck, is a popular account known for resharing viral videos and images. Many of its posts have previously been labeled as misleading or fake by X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking initiative, Community Notes.

There is no community note on the post in question.

Drake’s Slide Pops Up On eBay?

The story of Drake’s lost slide has since taken on a mythology of its own.

There are at least two eBay listings, claiming to be selling the lost slide for thousands of dollars.

The listings are suspicious to say the least. The seller of one of them, for instance, has indicated Palisades Park, New Jersey as their location — a doubtful claim considering we know Drake threw the slide in Sydney.

The other listing piggybacks on Sydney Water’s narrative, suggesting it’s the exact same slide that was found in the viral post.

The seller of that listing, too, seems to be located in the U.S.

So at this point, Drake’s notorious lost slide is in at least three separate locations at the same time — one in Sydney and two in the U.S. How can this be?

As you can guess, that’s not where this story ends.

Some accounts have since conflated Sydney Water’s narrative with the suspicious eBay listings, claiming that “someone” fished the slide out of the water and “listed it on eBay for $5,000.”

This particular claim comes from from the infamous WorldStarHipHop account, which boasts over 5.4 million followers on X. The post itself hasn’t gained much traction, sitting at a measly 38 likes at the time of writing.

Another post from a French account going by the name,
FRENCHRAPUS, repeating the same claims has accumulated over 8.7 likes and nearly 1 million views, though.

Indeed, the post is a stitch-up of the original drone footage and a clip from Sydney Water’s viral Instagram post.

There are no community notes on any of these posts.

I reached out to eBay for comment on the listings, but I’ve not heard back. Asked about the authenticity of the Instagram post about Drake’s lost slide, a spokesperson for Sydney Water declined to comment on the record.