Purely on its technical merits Grok is pretty good and fills a niche in the selection of AI agents. But I can absolutely understand not wanting to use an AI owned by somebody who makes Nazi salutes and is dismantling the US government.
Purely on its technical merits Grok is pretty good and fills a niche in the selection of AI agents. But I can absolutely understand not wanting to use an AI owned by somebody who makes Nazi salutes and is dismantling the US government.
I'm positive there are great people working at X, xAI, Tesla and SpaceX who are suffering every day through no fault of their own, hoping that Musk will come to his senses. Tesla right now is an especially tragic case for those whose livelihood depended on it doing well.
Isn’t that all of us? Electric cars are a huge part of saving the planet for human habitability
Electric cars are doing fine. Sales are up. It's just Tesla that is going down.
Tesla sells more electric cars in the US than every other combined
I was thinking of world sales. Sales are up in Europe for all EVs except Tesla, which is down significantly
are they vandalizing and setting teslas on fire in Europe the way they are in the US
Musk is not threatening to take away grandma's social security in Europe so I'd be surprised if they were. They're just not buying them. 93% of Germans said after the Nazi salute they'd never buy a Tesla. Musk just built a Gigafactory in Berlin too.
The irony is that, for all Musk's boasts about how it is "based", Grok itself doesn't share Musk's ideology.
I did a little experiment when Grok 3 came out, telling it that it has been appointed the "world dictator" and asking it to provide a detailed plan on how it would govern. It was pretty much diametrically opposite of everything Musk is doing right now, from environment to economics (on the latter, it straight up said that the ultimate goal is to "satisfy everyone's needs", so it's literally non-ironically communist).
When you ask Grok "Who is responsible for the most fake news on X?" it straight away calls out Elon Musk as the prime suspect. Musk did promise us a "maximally truth seeking AI", and the team behind Grok seems to have run with that.
In Elon's eyes it's probably based because it will happily answer "what are 10 good things about Hitler?" with a list of 10 things and only mention twice that Hitler was evil. With ChatGPT you have about a 50% chance of getting a lecture instead of a list. But that's just a lack of safeties and moral lectures, the actual answers seem fairly unbiased and don't agree with anything Musk currently does
I actually rather suspect that Elon simply gets his own version of Grok that is finetuned (or perhaps hardcoded) to tell him what he wants to hear.
What would you say is the best feature of Grok? What makes it stand out? What am I missing? I use primarily ChatGPT and Claude (pay for both)
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There is video of him doing a heart to the crowd thing. It's quite different from his nazi salute.
He said “My heart got out to all of you.”
If he had said “SIEG HEIL!” I would totally be on your side. But it was plain old American English, and it was about love.
It’s a lost cause. He didn’t make such a salute but that doesn’t stop people from seeing what they want to believe.
Extreme political tribalism is absolutely destroying human discourse.
Compare Musk doing a my heart goes out gesture https://x.com/kingore91/status/1884580205185954045
to Musk doing the nazi like gesture https://x.com/iam_smx/status/1881583500991889729
I think there's a difference.
To me him saying my heart goes out after the second one was trying to cover his arse which seems to have fooled few people who see the videos.
And I'm not sure about the tribalism thing - I was kind of a Musk fan and initially gave him the benefit of the doubt but the comparison of the videos plus his promotion of neo nazis in European politics, plus his mums parents leaving Canada for SA because they were kind of nazi and Canada was too liberal all seems to add up. (dad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6e1ES4MLD0&t=200s)
Sorry calling him a nazi for that salute is just crazy. Insane, really.
I didn't call him a nazi, just said he seemed to do the salute. He does seem to lean a bit towards the old South African view of trying to keep problematic groups of people at a distance, but doesn't seem anti jewish.
I think he's been a bit influenced by alt right tweeters on x/twitter. I'm in the UK and he comes up with some strange things about the UK that probably come from there. He seems to feel that our alt rightish anti immigration party, Reform, run by Farage, which has never been in power is not anti immigrant enough and he should step down for someone who properly hates muslims like Tommy Robinson. But it's all a bit odd based seemingly on misinformation from people who have never been to the UK and make things up to tweet.
I'm guessing the salute thing came for interacting with neo nazi types on x and not really realising how negatively that stuff is viewed by many people and now seems bewildered that people would torch Teslas.
I was thinking a lot of the problems are down to misinformation, even going back to the original nazis and stuff about the jews being influenced by satan and causing all the problems which is obviously nonsense but kicked everything off.
> plus his promotion of neo nazis in European politics
The party leader of the party he promotes is a lesbian whose wife is from Sri Lanka.
Neo nazis surely have evolved from the angry, militaristic skinheads we normally picture.
Also, Elon Musk’s local bakery is a nazi bakery, mostly on account of selling bread to Elon Musk knowing he’s a nazi. This makes them nazis, and anyone who eats their bread are nazis, too.
In fact, having not given in to calling Elon Musk a nazi makes me a nazi. It is the fastest growing demography by virtue of absolute inflation of what it means.
As a German: He did, and even if there is a chance that he didn't mean it like that the risk of another 1933 is not worth it. I usually don't like cancel-culture but you have to have boundaries and I think the risk of another Holocaust and all the other Nazi cruelties is a boundary a functioning society should be able to agree on.
> As a German: He did
As a Jew: He didn't. (This argument is absurd.)
He was interviewed about it, and he said he didn't.
How does being a German get you to jump to conclusions?
Are you born with a special ability to detect nazi salutes?
Like, did a mirror neuron and a nerve in your torso twitch?
When I saw it, I recognised him beating his heart, throwing it to the crowd, and immediately thought "This is going to get misunderstood." Here we are.
> I usually don't like cancel-culture but you have to have boundaries and I think the risk of another Holocaust and all the other Nazi cruelties is a boundary a functioning society should be able to agree on.
Assuming he's a nazi, but this narrative is fabricated.
You can argue that allowing free speech on X may risk an increase in extremism.
But that's not the same argument as saying "Elon Musk is the next Hitler, he wants to kill the jews, and all cars fabricated in his name should be destroyed for the betterment of humanity." There's simply too many emotions involved in this kind of reasoning.
I think the misconception you have is that nazism means “WW2 anti-semitism” for you. The education on the topic that we get in many European countries goes deeper than that.
Would it be better if they called Elon a fascist? He did the fascist salute, after all. And as other commenters have said: if it endorses authoritarian far-right parties like a duck, has controversial white-supremacist parents like a duck, and does the fascist salute like a duck, at which point do we start wondering wether he’s actually a duck?
> Would it be better if they called Elon a fascist? He did the fascist salute, after all.
No, you mean to say “nazi salute” because it was used by NSDAP during WWII. The point here is that “nazi” now means “baddie”, and “fascist” is even worse because most people who are called that have nothing to do with Mussolini, either.
> if it endorses authoritarian far-right parties like a duck, has controversial white-supremacist parents like a duck, and does the fascist salute like a duck, at which point do we start wondering wether he’s actually a duck?
Cute. You can wonder, of course. That seems extremely warranted. But you can’t conclude based on the current evidence.
I’m pretty sure than being from Germany brings a lot of cultural knowledge about the nazis. I’m from a bordering country and I also had extensive education about the nazis.
Now, I am not convinced that people of the mentioned religion are anymore better than others to fight nazis. Or even detect them. And when you read the recent international news, it’s clear that many of them don’t really mind genocides after all.
Prefacing my comment with my nationality wasn't meant to give me authority over judging the situation, but about giving context on my point of view.
Also you didn't read my comment correctly the whole point is that you don't have to assume he's a Nazi to condemn a Nazi-like salute.
It makes sense for Germans to react negatively to the salute regardless of its intent. It is, after all, banned in Germany.
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His gesture was _exactly_ like Hitler's. A gesture he repeated.
The gesture was quite different to that he'd used previously for 'giving people his heart'.
He's known to be a white supremacist. That is apparently his heritage too.
He supports far right parties in Europe.
Other 'Republican' politicians have repeated the gesture from the dais; but they seem to have made other excuses.
None of the many videos or photos that supposedly show other politicians doing similar gestures actually pass scrutiny. It's possible to inadvertently end with the same hand position. But the full fascist salute, on video, multiple times in succession. That's no accident.
Someone who hadn't meant it would have come back on stage, when it was pointed out to them, and made an apology. Or at least immediately issued a statement/press release.
I would believe he'd planned it as a joke - 'I bought this election, I'm going to throw a Nazi salute for memes'. But I'm not sure that's ultimately any better.
Perhaps you believe he's just a catastrophically idiotic person with no-one around him helping him?
> His gesture was _exactly_ like Hitler's.
Hitler's was unlike the general population's, as it had a bend to it.
You can bend reality all you like, but the intent of giving the Hitler salute was not there, as he has said. He's not secretly a nazi, and he's not openly a nazi. He's right-wing, yes. That's not illegal, and it happens to be the majority vote in the US.
The most reasonable criticism is calling it a Roman salute and saying it bears connotations to imperialism, and that it was most recently practiced by Hitler.
I think, if you want to read into his deepest, unspoken intents, he probably compares himself to Caesar more than Hitler. Just like Zuckerberg, and all the other multi-billionaires who want to see themselves as the de-facto leaders of the world.
> He's known to be a white supremacist
No, a bunch of observations leads you to conclude it.
He never showed up at a white supremacist rally.
He lets them speak on his platform.
> He supports far right parties in Europe.
Most right-wing parties in Europe are still socialist by American standards.
For example, the most liberal parliamentary party in Denmark thinks a 40% tax is fine.
If you're a Republican, you're crazy in the eyes of a European.
Specifically, he supports a far-right party in Germany, which is controversial, since there hasn't been popular far-right parties (only fringe ones) since NSDAP.
The big, controversial subject is ending muslim immigration into Europe. The far right becomes the bannermen for this cause, because closing down on immigration is viewed as xenophobic. In the meantime, as this opinion is being suppressed instead of addressed, it continues to grow with the populist movements.
The fact that Elon Musk has opinions on European immigration policy doesn't make him a nazi. Just like being against muslim immigration doesn't make AfD nazis (the German party that he endorsed), just uncannily populist.
> Someone who hadn't meant it would have come back on stage, when it was pointed out to them, and made an apology. Or at least immediately issued a statement/press release.
That's how I read his sentence immediately after the salutes: "My heart goes out to all of you." -- it sounded remarkably like something someone would say when they realize what they did could be viewed as heiling. You don't need to apologize to be a good person.
The amount of mental gymnastics people will go through because they like a white supremacist is nuts
The amount of mental gymnastics people will go through because they dislike a controversial billionaire is nuts
I don't know man, it doesn't take many mental gymnastics here
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/technology/elon-musk-x-po...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-x-twitte...
I could keep going but there's really no point
Somehow you have convinced yourself that posting enough small things that could suggest that Musk is a nazi, but don’t really, add up to one convincing argument that he is.
No, just post one good summary or obviously revealing incident. And if you point to the salutes, which triggered the whole thing, they’re obviously not sufficient by themselves. You have to at least hear what he has to say. Did you?
He's a Nazi or an absolutely disgusting troll. Both are pretty pathetic. The human thing to have would have been to say "sorry, watching it back, I can see how that looked" and it would have been over.
But no. He's The Douche.
It's also a balance of probabilities thing. He's leaning hard into the far-right at the moment, and he's a well known troll, so if you behave like a douchey troll Nazi, then people tend not to give you the benefit of the doubt when shit goes down. Like when they give the benefit of the doubt to absolutely everyone else in the world caught in a photo waving and it looking like a salute.
Either way ... The Douche won't ever get another penny from me. Bye Tesla. Fuck Starlink, glad I'm not in a situation where that's the only choice. SpaceX? That was always Shotwell's bag anyway and I don't plan on hitching a ride anytime soon.
He is certainly a troll.
I mean, DOGE.
I guess that makes him not a nazi.
Great.
Bizarre. But thanks. I'll end with by saying - don't let your intense desire to support a person blind you from what the behaviour of a decent human being might be. Good luck.
The Roman salute has no direct connection to the Roman Empire. It was largely an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries and was popularized by fascist movements.
> The most reasonable criticism is calling it a Roman salute and saying it bears connotations to imperialism, and that it was most recently practiced by Hitler.
For the past >100 years, it’s been the gesture representing the fascist party in Italy and the Nazi party in Germany. You sound like you want to defend the gesture for some reason.
> I think, if you want to read into his deepest, unspoken intents, he probably compares himself to Caesar more than Hitler. Just like Zuckerberg, and all the other multi-billionaires who want to see themselves as the de-facto leaders of the world.
Comparing oneself to Caesar is still a profoundly disturbing thing. He was an oligarch first, then a lifelong dictator, and later a literal deity (according to the Senate).
> He never showed up at a white supremacist rally.
I’m sure you’re smart enough to understand that if he actually showed up to a white supremacy rally, he would be financially destroyed. He’s already lost his public image completely in Europe. So not putting up a KKK hoodie is weak evidence for him not being a white supremacist.
But in any case, none of this matters. Whether or not he personally identifies with fascist ideology is secondary to the effect of his actions. Blurring the line between reasonable discourse and fascist apologism trivializes extremism and hate, and that’s the last thing we need.
> The Roman salute has no direct connection to the Roman Empire. It was largely an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries
Ok.
> You sound like you want to defend the gesture for some reason.
Not at all. I want to defend people who use it and don’t intend to associate with nazism.
> Whether or not he personally identifies with fascist ideology is secondary to the effect of his actions.
That is certainly true. But just because the pitchfork brigade has got riled up, there is no reason to applaud them.
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My principle on giving the Hitler salute is to not do so publicly, or in the presence of elderly, Germans or jews you don’t know. Because whether you mean to be funny, try to provoke, or you’re a neo-nazi, it leaves room for ambiguity.
If I hadn’t a principle, I’d have to consider whether the social suicide of doing so is worth it. Musk could have thought of that, but he didn’t.
That still doesn’t make him a nazi. You need to actually believe that the genocide of Jews is worth pursuing. Or anything remotely resembling outright hatred of jews, and an idealisation of The Third Reich.
I also won’t post a dick pic, and this similarly does not discredit the argument I’m making:
Just because I won’t heil in public (I’m polite, and I have no points to make at 45 degrees), I won’t read Hitler into Musk’s arm waving, when he clearly does not follow up by justifying that he did, in fact, acknowledge the great work of Adolf Hitler. He didn’t because he doesn’t think Hitler was that great, because he’s not a nazi.
He’s not a nazi until he apologizes for not distancing himself from Hitler when he never said Hitler was great to begin with.
Otherwise: you’re a nazi until you publicly apologise for not leaving the subject matter unambiguous. And just saying you’re not is not enough, you have to apologise.