Talking Trump and Musk with Grok

Lex Luthor’s AI chatbot has some interesting ideas about its creator

Elon Musk was Ask Questions Later’s 2024 Person of the Year, so we are under no suspicion of underappreciating his impact. He has validated our selection in the first several months of the year, when he organized for himself the most astounding unofficial appointment in the history of the Republic.

Musk is now effectively in charge of the new Department for Government Efficiency, whose acronym would be perfect if it contained a D before the G (I have some candidates for the additional word in the title). Thus is the world’s richest man gleefully firing, more or less at will, many thousands of middle-income employees and impoverishing countless of other yet poorer ones.

Musk is also, through the biggest megaphone in history (social media’s X, the mutation of Twitter), effectively promoting far-right disruptors around the world, most prominently Germany’s AfD party, which is widely shunned in its home country for neo-Nazi roots. This, as part of Donald Trump’s effort to weaken Europe by sowing divisions and tearing down the post-World War II order that kept the peace. Nothing ventured — nothing gained!

And if that wasn’t enough impact from Musk, he also has given the world Grok, the AI chatbot developed by his X.AI startup (which gets part of its data from X itself, not just from mainstream media). Because it is supposedly unbiased and unfiltered, Musk has called it “the most fun AI in the world.”

I am a person who likes a bit of fun, so I signed up for Grok and asked it some fun questions.

Here’s the result.