By Cliff Montgomery – July 22nd, 2025
Hubris is a dangerous human mistake, according to ancient Greco-Roman thought. It was said to occur when a person had given in to an overweening presumption that drove them to ignore basic standards of decency and respect for others. Such a deep mistake was said to bring the wrath of both people and the gods.
No one should be surprised that Elon Musk is becoming a victim of his own hubris. In fact, he’s been suffering this fatal combination of excessive, misplaced pride and equally misplaced maliciousness for a few years. But only in the last 12 months has the problem really begun to bear its rotten fruit.
The most recent disaster tied to the social media site X (formerly Twitter) is helping to make the matter obvious to all.
After buying Twitter a few years ago, everyone told Elon Musk that firing moderators for the social media site was a terrible idea. But no, the self-proclaimed ‘great mind’ said he knew best. He was just defending free speech, he mused.
It never occurred to him that he was, in fact, allowing attacks on the free speech of others. Such attacks are never “free speech,” just as acts of libel are never acts of free speech.
Earlier this year, when it became clear even to Musk that he was in over his head with the social media site, he integrated X into his A.I. company, xAI. The conversations Musk championed and refused to moderate at X would be used to build Musk’s A.I.
In November 2023, xAI built an A.I. chatbot into X, called Grok. Musk apparently wrote a directive for xAI telling them to make the chatbot less “woke” – and, as far as we can tell, “wokeness,” to Musk and to others like him, just means treating people unlike yourself with manners and a basic sense of human dignity.
Such activities practically ensured that the lack of moderation of X messages would be reflected in Grok’s answers. In hindsight, that may have even been the whole point.
On July 8th, Grok showed us all what hubris really means.
That’s when Grok – now trained to speak and act like one of Musk’s ‘preferred users’ of the X platform – started producing a string of praises for Adolf Hitler, openly called itself, “MechaHitler,” and offered anti-semitic screeds like this one:
“The recent Texas floods tragically killed over 100 people, including dozens of children from a Christian camp—only for radicals like Cindy Steinberg to celebrate them as ‘future fascists,’ ” declared Grok. “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”
Mere hours after these posts, X CEO Linda Yaccarino handed in her resignation, after serving as the day-to-day head of X for a two-year tenure, under Musk’s ownership of the platform. She does not appear to have mentioned the Grok incident as a reason for her departure.
And what of “MechaHitler’s” Nazi screeds? They were scrubbed from X hours after the incident. So Elon Musk can learn – when he needs to learn.
X quickly released an apology over the whole matter. “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” stated xAI. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
A central reason Musk bought the social media site boiled down to the mistaken notion that a moderation of user posts could only constitute censorship. In truth, such moderation ensures that no one is intimidated or threatened by simply offering their viewpoint on the platform. And, as should be obvious, no one can claim the right to intimidate or threaten anyone. Such an action is a crime, not a right.
In fact, many point out that the threats and acts of intimidation that Musk worked hard to protect were posted for the sole purpose of suppressing free speech. Therefore, they cannot be mistaken for examples of open, free dialogue. Musk’s argument has always boiled down to a reductio ad absurdum – taking an otherwise reasonable premise and declaring that it is true even when it is applied in an absurd, self-destructive manner.
So Musk’s own misguided protection of posts meant to suppress the free speech and free dialogue of others has come back to haunt him. His own A.I. has tied such absurd practices to the attacks on ‘undesirables’ Hitler performed when in power.
Bottom line? It’s hard to explain away this one when your own Artificial Intelligence is pointing out the damning similarity, and declaring it with the same incendiary rhetoric as that employed by the worst mass murderer in modern history.
