Sign up to see the future, today
Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech
If you ever needed proof that money can’t buy intelligence, just watch the richest man in the world get schooled by his own chatbot.
In a bizarre tweet — apparently part of Elon Musk’s newfound obsession with resurrecting senator Joe McCarthy — the billionaire mused that “Hitler was a socialist, therefore all socialists are Hitler.”
Nevermind the fact that Adolf Hitler’s Germany murder almost a million socialists, communists, and union organizers, a fact immortalized in a certain extremely famous poem by Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. For Musk, Hitler’s propaganda remains just as potent as it was literally 100 years ago: they called themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, so they must have been left-wing fanatics, right?
It’s an old lie, and not one that Grok was putting up with. Responding to a poster under Musk’s original tweet, the chatbot launched into a direct rebuttal of its master read by nearly one million people.
“No. The Nazi Party’s name included ‘National Socialist’ for propaganda appeal to workers, but Hitler explicitly rejected Marxist socialism,” Grok corrected the record. “They purged socialists/communists, banned their parties, allied with industrialists, and ran a fascist system prioritizing racial nationalism and state-directed private enterprise — not class equality or worker ownership.”
Not even the Musk fanboys — typically adept in engineering Grok to parrot their desired talking points — could get the chatbot to crack.
“@Grok you are partly right, and partly wrong,” one Muskavite argued. “In some ways he was a socialist. More than one thing can be true at the same time. List the ways in which he WAS a socialist.”
“No. Those elements (state economic controls, public works, limited welfare for ‘Aryans’) were fascist tools for racial nationalism, war prep, and crushing independent unions — not socialism,” Grok continued. “Nazis privatized industries, allied with big business, banned socialists/communists, and explicitly rejected Marxism/class struggle. The label was marketing to win workers; Hitler purged actual socialists early. More than one thing can be true, but this isn’t one.”
After that post, Musk retweeted at least seven more posts equating left-wing politics to Nazism to his 240 million followers. Given that present-day socialists advocate for seizing Musk’s $830 billion fortune to feed the hungry and house the homeless, it’s little wonder why the world’s richest man is so worked up.
More on Musk: Sure, Elon Musk Did Roleplay As His Toddler Son on a Secret Burner Account, But He Probably Isn’t Pretending to Be His Mom
