GTA 6 Trailer 2 Red Dead Redemption 2 Easter Eggs Explained

Eagle-eyed fans paused Trailer 2 frame by frame and found money that should not exist in Vice City, at least not according to the calendar. The GTA 6 Red Dead Redemption 2 connection took off when viewers spotted RDR2 references hidden in the official second trailer, reigniting a long-running fan theory that Rockstar's games share one universe. The footage is real. The shared-universe reading is where caution comes in. The presidents on the $10 bill The standout detail sits at roughly the 2:07 mark of Trailer 2, which Rockstar released on May 6 2025. In that moment, an NPC throws $10 bills, and the faces printed on them are not real US presidents. As reported by GamesRadar+ and ComicBook, the bills carry Thaddeus Waxman and Franklin Hardin, two fictional presidents from Red Dead Redemption 2. Waxman is the bigger find of the two. In RDR2, set in 1899, Waxman was the sitting fictional president, which means GTA 6 is putting a character from Rockstar's western on its modern currency. For fans tracking connections between Rockstar titles, seeing an RDR2 president on a Leonida $10 bill was an immediate flag. The "D" on the weapon A second detail surfaced shortly after. A separate screenshot from the trailer shows a pistol or rifle marked with a "D" rendered in the same font as "Dukes," the weapon manufacturer from Red Dead Redemption 2. This was spotted by X analyst SynthPotato and covered by TheGamer on May 10 2025. On its own, a single letter is thin evidence. Paired with the fictional presidents on the currency, though, it added to the sense that Rockstar deliberately seeded RDR2 references into the GTA 6 trailer rather than leaving coincidences. Confirmed footage, fan-theory canon Here is the line that matters. The references in the trailer are confirmed. The bills with Waxman and Hardin are visible, and the "Dukes" font detail has been documented frame by frame. What is not confirmed is that these references prove a shared canon universe linking Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto. The "shared universe" idea is a long-running fan theory, not a Rockstar statement. Rockstar has never officially declared that its games occupy one continuous canon. Easter eggs like these are exactly the kind of cross-game wink the studio enjoys, and they can be deliberate nods without confirming a single timeline. Reading them as proof of canon is interpretation that fans bring to the footage, not something Rockstar has endorsed. A word on the wider leak swamp It is worth a brief caution that the broader pool of circulating "GTA 6 leaks" is unreliable, with plenty of AI-generated images and recycled fakes passing around social media. The trailer easter eggs covered here are different precisely because they come from official footage released by Rockstar, which is why they hold up while so much else does not. Why fans keep digging The appeal of these finds is obvious. Rockstar's trailers reward close viewing, and details like a fictional president on a banknote or a manufacturer's font on a weapon give the community something concrete to analyze. Whether or not they signal a shared universe, they confirm that GTA 6's world is dense with references for players to uncover. When players finally explore Leonida for themselves and start hunting easter eggs in the open world, the community will gather on servers built to celebrate every hidden detail. 6Charts will help players find, vote on, and review the GTA 6 servers where that exploration plays out.