Grok?

What fascinates me about Musk’s little AI circus is how perfectly it captures the state of his empire. Here is a man who once sold us the future, now flogging a chatbot that can’t even tell you who won an election without veering off into MAGA cosplay. Grok is supposed to mean understanding, yet it behaves like Echo Chamber AI with a head injury, confidently announcing that Trump won in 2020. It isn’t understanding anything. It is just rinsing and repeating the collective anxieties of Musk’s timelines.

And what does that say about him? Nothing good. If your own AI can’t distinguish a certified election result from a Facebook meme, it suggests you’ve lost interest in truth altogether. You’ve chosen noise over knowledge and grievance over responsibility. Musk now operates in symbols, not facts. His pronouncements read less like analysis and more like the mood swings of a man desperate for validation from the angriest corners of his own platform. He speaks to his tribe, not to reality.

The knock-on effect for AI is toxic. Every time Grok parrots a lie as if it were gospel, the public’s trust in the whole field takes a hit. One partisan toy makes the careful work look suspect. It feeds the myth that AI is unreliable by design, rather than unreliable by choice. It muddies the line between evidence and opinion and hands a gift to every politician or pundit desperate to dismiss AI as a passing fad. When opinion is given the same status as truth, everything that depends on trust gets dragged into the swamp.

And then there is the Tesla problem. If Musk is this cavalier about accuracy in a chatbot, why on earth should anyone trust him with autonomy systems that decide whether you live or die at 70 miles an hour? Regulators already treat his self-driving claims as marketing wrapped in hope. Now they will see them as part of the same pattern: truth stretched to breaking point, promises that wobble under scrutiny, and a leader who thinks reliability is optional. Investors notice. Governments notice. Ordinary drivers absolutely notice.

It is all of a piece. Grok, X, the culture war posturing, the messianic grandstanding, the self-driving fantasy world where everything is always one software patch away from perfection. Strip away the noise and you’re left with something painfully simple: a man who once built rockets now builds narratives, and he no longer seems to care whether any of them are true.