Elon Musk appears to be going through it.
On Saturday, the billionaire became the subject of widespread mockery after boasting about how the video generating model from his AI company xAI, Grok Imagine, can fabricate a photorealistic clip of a woman looking into the camera and declaring her undying love for you — which is either an indication that Musk thinks his fans are a bunch of lonely sad sacks, or that he himself is one, or both.
“Grok Imagine prompt: She smiles and says, ‘I will always love you,’” Musk wrote in a post with the video on his website X, formerly Twitter, published at the very well-adjusted hour of 4:20 AM (Musk is a late riser, so this was likely posted at the end of a long day, not the beginning of it.)
The resulting video, true to Musk’s prompt, does show a clearly AI-generated woman saying “I will always love you” in a voice that’s obviously of AI origin — which, all subtext aside, is an unconvincing demonstration of Grok’s supposedly incredible capabilities.
It gets even sadder. Replying to his own post, Musk also revealed that the AI-generated woman was actually one that he saw in another Grok-created image by a fan. In other words, Musk didn’t just ask for a generic video of a fake woman saying he loves him — he wanted someone else’s specific fake AI woman to do it.
The ensuing mockery was vicious.
“I guess it kinda makes sense that the first trillionaire is the biggest loser of all time,” wrote author John Ganz. (Last week, shareholders at Musk’s company Tesla approved an outrageous pay package for Musk worth up to $1 trillion.)
Netizens elsewhere on the site dubbed Musk’s video “the saddest post in the history of this website” and also the “most divorced post of all time.”
For context, Musk interpersonal relationships are famously fraught. Musk has married two women and been divorced thrice, and has fathered at least 14 children that we know of with multiple partners. Not all remember him fondly. Musk went through an ugly breakup and even uglier custody battle with his former partner, the pop musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher, over the three children they had together, including the now four-year-old named X Æ A-12. (Some observed that the recent AI video somewhat resembled Grimes.) Nor is he vying for father of the year: he’s completely estranged from his daughter Vivian Wilson, whom he has frequently attacked for being transgender. Wilson disowned Musk, whom she says treated her cruelly while she was growing up.
Then there’s Musk disarming obsession with breeding (hence the 14 or more kids). He frequently solicits women to have his children, usually by propositioning them with a donation of his sperm. One of these women worked at one of his own companies and another was a conservative influencer that Musk had interacted with on Twitter, the latter of whom he reportedly offered $15 million to keep his relationship to the child a secret. Musk has also been accused of exposing his genitals to a flight attendant employed by SpaceX, touching her leg, and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for doing “more.”
Now we’ve laid out all that baggage, you’ll now understand why Musk’s recent post will dump a bunch of fuel onto an already raging fire amid fresher concerns over his seeming unhealthy infatuation for AI companions.
In July, Musk’s xAI announced that its AI chatbot Grok — the same one that called itself “MechaHitler” not too long ago — now came with several official digital personas, including an anime girl named “Ani” dressed in a racy outfit. In a word: a waifu.
No one appeared to like Ani more than Musk himself. In the weeks following, he responded to multiple lewd depictions of the AI companion. His open infatuation with Ani became so blatant that even his fans began accusing him of “gooning to AI Anime.” Recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal underscored the depths of his obsession; Musk, per the reporting, has taken a personal hand in designing Ani, to such an extent that it drew concern from his own employees.
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