A week after a humiliating midterms, Elon Musk is back to his old habits: flirting with Nazism.
Perhaps Musk really didn’t intend to perform back-to-back salutes that suspiciously looked a lot like a Sieg Hiel at a Trump inauguration party nearly two years ago, but you have to admit that he has quite the track record when it comes to espousing white supremacist conspiracy theories and interacting with people who wouldn’t hesitate to describe themselves as outright Nazis.
This time, his racist run-in was even called out by his own chatbot, Grok. On Sunday night, Musk responded to a supremacist meme posted by an account called @VladTheInflator railing against “white guilt” by downplaying the Atlantic slave trade in a way reminiscent of Holocaust denialism, while also perpetrating racist myths about slavery in Africa. Musk tagged Grok to ask if the meme’s claims were true, which the AI assessed to be “mostly accurate.”
This questionable interaction didn’t get overlooked by other users on the site, though, one of whom turned Grok back on its creator by asking the “maximum truth-seeking” AI to confirm if Musk was replying to a Nazi account.
“Yes,” Grok responded, seemingly atoning for all the times it called itself “MechaHitler.” “VladTheInflator has posted that being called a Nazi ‘feels like a compliment,’ that ‘Nazis are sounding better by the day,’ and that ‘Everything Hitler said about Zionists was true,’ plus explicit racial hierarchy claims.”
Grok explained in a helpful followup that Musk and the Nazi account go back. “Elon has replied to and retweeted VladTheInflator multiple times before this,” it said.
It’s not just that one account, either. Musk has an extensive history with promoting racist talking points and endorsing those posted by other far right figures, including a debunked conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in his homeland of South Africa.
His Grok-edited Wikipedia alternative, Grokipedia, has been caught citing actual neo-Nazi forums as sources of information. He also hosted an article writing contest on X and awarded the first place prize to a user who described himself as, and we quote, a “Nazi.” He even appeared at a rally of the German far-right party, AfD, telling the country that it needs to get over its guilt for the Holocaust.
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