Whatever. If this is inappropriate, let me know and I’ll delete them.
Chapter 2: The Attack on Democracy
In a former factory hall in Palo Alto, Peter Barrett strolls past a gigantic indoor slide before slumping into a chair in a conference room and crossing his legs. Barrett is founder and chief technologist of Playground, one of those venture capitalists that turn startups into corporations and their founders into multimillion-dollar CEOs with their investments in Silicon Valley. Barrett was once one of those himself. His computer games forge Rocket Science Games wanted to combine the best of Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the screen. To do that, he brought some of the country’s most talented programmers on board, including a certain Elon Musk.
The company flopped a few years later, Musk moved on. Even then, Barrett says, he could see that Musk actually wanted to “do his own thing.” “He was very, very smart. Each of us knew that one day he would become an entrepreneur.” To this day, Barrett has a noticeable fascination for Musk’s drive. SpaceX and Tesla are “incredible companies,” Barrett says. Elon’s curiosity, his unbridled will paired with modesty, were “outstanding.” Then he pauses rhetorically.
“But his political views are a mystery to me.” His former friend Musk, now “not the boy I knew. And that’s very confusing and perplexing to me.” Today, South African-born Musk, once an immigrant to the U.S. himself, rails against migrants, denies climate change with Trump, which he once wanted to fight with Tesla.
Why? Barrett, long financially independent himself, shakes his head. Being a billionaire can be a challenge. “Because suddenly you can do anything you want.” There are no more limits for “messianic characters.” Musk apparently thinks “only of himself,” no longer of the common good. “And that’s very human. When people cheer you long enough, you start to believe some of it at some point.”
Money corrupts character, the saying goes. But does that make his former employee Musk a danger to humanity? Barrett doesn’t have to search long for an answer. X is “not a good way” for Elon to use his technical talent. But a “real challenge” - because the platform can be “used as a weapon to threaten democracy.”
When Elon Musk took over Twitter two years ago, he made two promises to the world: the platform would be politically “neutral” under him - and free of any censorship. He hoped he would thereby “promote democracy and civil discourse.”
In fact, right after the purchase, Musk began rebuilding Twitter into a political agitation machine. The price of $44 billion seemed grotesque. But the economic consideration falls short. Musk can now undisturbed create the reality in which he apparently lives - or wants to live.
With the takeover, Musk fired the majority of the international teams that had previously moderated the most blatant content. At the same time, he reactivated numerous blocked user accounts, including many of conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists. When authoritarian regimes like Turkey demand deletions and bans, Musk readily complies. Journalists he doesn’t like are sometimes blocked. Musk parted ways with a well-known U.S. TV moderator who was supposed to get a new format on X before the first episode aired: He didn’t like the questions for the talk show guest - that was Musk himself.
Like an authoritarian guru, Musk rants on X against illegal migrants, established media and the “woke” zeitgeist. He regularly spreads conspiracy myths that are suitable for undermining trust in democracy and its institutions.
According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted 50 misleading or false posts about the U.S. election via his channel from January to July of this year. They were viewed around 1.2 billion times. The secret services of the GDR called this strategy “erosion.” Under Musk, Twitter has become a “home for hate and disinformation,” law professor Maya Wiley tells DER SPIEGEL. The billionaire directly promoted the accounts of white racists and neo-Nazis, says the chair of the largest association of U.S. civil rights movements.
Musk biographer Walter Isaacson describes a “demon mode” that Musk sometimes slips into. A kind of dark tunnel the billionaire gets into. “Then he gets dark and retreats into the storm in his head,” is how Musk’s ex-partner, Canadian musician Grimes, describes it. She talks about Musk’s emotional awareness being developed differently than in average people. “He has different moods and many quite different personalities, and he switches between them extremely quickly.”
For X, the new boss is damaging to business. Almost all major advertising clients, such as Apple and Disney, have now withdrawn from the platform. Musk announced he would sue them, accused them of “blackmail” and threw a “Fuck yourself” after them. According to investment firm Fidelity, X’s market value is now only around $9.4 billion - not even a quarter of the purchase price.
From his fans, however, Musk gets frenzied applause for his course. They like and retweet every crude claim, many admire him unconditionally. When Musk spread in July that voting machines and mail-in ballots were too insecure and only in-person voting should be allowed, only agreement was found among the most widely circulated comments. Recently, he made the claim that Democrats want to import millions of migrants, who then allegedly vote for them by a majority. This nonsense was read more than 100 million times.
Musk and X seem to have long since spun out of control. These are not good signs for the avalanche that is currently rolling toward social networks, public communication and democracy as a whole: AI-generated content.
Musk is also involved here. After all, he once co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In 2018, he left, and recently even sued co-founder Sam Altman because the company was no longer developing the technology for the benefit of humanity, but for pure profit.
Publicly, Musk enjoys the role of warning against the dangers of AI. In fact, he has long since launched a new AI company of his own, with a possibly far more dangerous model.
Through xAI, he offers paying X users a generative AI called Grok. The program delivers texts and now also images within seconds. Unlike ChatGPT, for example, there seem to be few moral, ethical or legal boundaries, but answers “to almost any question.” When the latest version of Grok was released in August, users reported that they were able to generate instructions for bomb making and Nazi propaganda without much ado. Or a plan for how a rampage at a school could be made as deadly as possible. In one test, analysts even had the AI draw a picture showing Musk in a classroom - holding an assault rifle.
Musk has since downplayed this, saying Grok is an AI committed to truth and that any errors are being corrected immediately. He touts Grok’s big advantage over the AI competition as the program’s ability to “access X in real time.” However, scientists at Northwestern University near Chicago see this very thing as the danger. “X is not exactly known for its accuracy,” the AI experts write. Musk’s AI could produce “misinformation on a large scale.” Moreover, Grok has no comprehensive safeguards in place to prevent misinformation from spreading uncontrollably.
Examples already exist. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential nomination, Grok spread the false news, shared millions of times, for over a week that candidates could no longer be changed so late in the race. Ministers from five U.S. states complained helplessly to Musk that Grok had lied about the U.S. election process.
Is this the political battlefield of the future? Social networks in which an unrestrained and unbridled AI is at the service of trolls and enemies of democracy, autocrats and despots of any color and provenance, giving them the opportunity to produce lies in unprecedented quantity and convincing quality? Does truth, does democracy even stand a chance against this?
The beauty for Musk is that he can’t even be held liable for such madness.
“The original sin,” says German media scholar Joseph Vogl, currently teaching at Princeton University in the U.S., was the year 1996. That’s when the U.S. government restructured its telecommunications law so that platform operators can no longer be held liable for the content distributed on them - but their users can. The calls for violence and discrimination that exist today on X and at Musk’s behest are an effect of this privilege, he says: “In a democratic media world, this liability privilege would have to be abolished.”
Meanwhile, Musk is creating facts, shifting resources, talent and money from his companies toward xAI for months. He’s building the next big thing, a “computer gigafactory” that’s growing on the site of an old industrial factory on the outskirts of Memphis. Nothing less than the “world’s largest supercomputer” is what it’s supposed to become.
Theoretically, he could one day feed this monstrous machine with the unimaginable mass of data his various companies collect all over the world. For example, the data that his millions of Teslas record daily on the world’s roads. Or the data generated by SpaceX’s rocket launches. Or possibly the data that Neuralink will soon collect from human brains.
Artificial intelligence could be the interface for Elon Musk to connect his previously rather disparate empire. Someone like him has all the resources to be at the forefront of the AI race as well. Especially if he saves everything that makes the technology expensive and complicated: a well-positioned security department that contains the machine and protects humanity. xAI would thus become a powerful central hub in Musk’s empire, a data cockpit at whose control knobs the billionaire himself would sit. Next to him perhaps his buddy Trump. Possibly as president. Duo infernale.
Whatever. If this is inappropriate, let me know and I’ll delete them.
Chapter 2: The Attack on Democracy
In a former factory hall in Palo Alto, Peter Barrett strolls past a gigantic indoor slide before slumping into a chair in a conference room and crossing his legs. Barrett is founder and chief technologist of Playground, one of those venture capitalists that turn startups into corporations and their founders into multimillion-dollar CEOs with their investments in Silicon Valley. Barrett was once one of those himself. His computer games forge Rocket Science Games wanted to combine the best of Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the screen. To do that, he brought some of the country’s most talented programmers on board, including a certain Elon Musk.
The company flopped a few years later, Musk moved on. Even then, Barrett says, he could see that Musk actually wanted to “do his own thing.” “He was very, very smart. Each of us knew that one day he would become an entrepreneur.” To this day, Barrett has a noticeable fascination for Musk’s drive. SpaceX and Tesla are “incredible companies,” Barrett says. Elon’s curiosity, his unbridled will paired with modesty, were “outstanding.” Then he pauses rhetorically.
“But his political views are a mystery to me.” His former friend Musk, now “not the boy I knew. And that’s very confusing and perplexing to me.” Today, South African-born Musk, once an immigrant to the U.S. himself, rails against migrants, denies climate change with Trump, which he once wanted to fight with Tesla.
Why? Barrett, long financially independent himself, shakes his head. Being a billionaire can be a challenge. “Because suddenly you can do anything you want.” There are no more limits for “messianic characters.” Musk apparently thinks “only of himself,” no longer of the common good. “And that’s very human. When people cheer you long enough, you start to believe some of it at some point.” Money corrupts character, the saying goes. But does that make his former employee Musk a danger to humanity? Barrett doesn’t have to search long for an answer. X is “not a good way” for Elon to use his technical talent. But a “real challenge” - because the platform can be “used as a weapon to threaten democracy.”
When Elon Musk took over Twitter two years ago, he made two promises to the world: the platform would be politically “neutral” under him - and free of any censorship. He hoped he would thereby “promote democracy and civil discourse.”
In fact, right after the purchase, Musk began rebuilding Twitter into a political agitation machine. The price of $44 billion seemed grotesque. But the economic consideration falls short. Musk can now undisturbed create the reality in which he apparently lives - or wants to live.
With the takeover, Musk fired the majority of the international teams that had previously moderated the most blatant content. At the same time, he reactivated numerous blocked user accounts, including many of conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists. When authoritarian regimes like Turkey demand deletions and bans, Musk readily complies. Journalists he doesn’t like are sometimes blocked. Musk parted ways with a well-known U.S. TV moderator who was supposed to get a new format on X before the first episode aired: He didn’t like the questions for the talk show guest - that was Musk himself.
Like an authoritarian guru, Musk rants on X against illegal migrants, established media and the “woke” zeitgeist. He regularly spreads conspiracy myths that are suitable for undermining trust in democracy and its institutions.
According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted 50 misleading or false posts about the U.S. election via his channel from January to July of this year. They were viewed around 1.2 billion times. The secret services of the GDR called this strategy “erosion.” Under Musk, Twitter has become a “home for hate and disinformation,” law professor Maya Wiley tells DER SPIEGEL. The billionaire directly promoted the accounts of white racists and neo-Nazis, says the chair of the largest association of U.S. civil rights movements.
Musk biographer Walter Isaacson describes a “demon mode” that Musk sometimes slips into. A kind of dark tunnel the billionaire gets into. “Then he gets dark and retreats into the storm in his head,” is how Musk’s ex-partner, Canadian musician Grimes, describes it. She talks about Musk’s emotional awareness being developed differently than in average people. “He has different moods and many quite different personalities, and he switches between them extremely quickly.”
For X, the new boss is damaging to business. Almost all major advertising clients, such as Apple and Disney, have now withdrawn from the platform. Musk announced he would sue them, accused them of “blackmail” and threw a “Fuck yourself” after them. According to investment firm Fidelity, X’s market value is now only around $9.4 billion - not even a quarter of the purchase price.
From his fans, however, Musk gets frenzied applause for his course. They like and retweet every crude claim, many admire him unconditionally. When Musk spread in July that voting machines and mail-in ballots were too insecure and only in-person voting should be allowed, only agreement was found among the most widely circulated comments. Recently, he made the claim that Democrats want to import millions of migrants, who then allegedly vote for them by a majority. This nonsense was read more than 100 million times.
Chapter 3: The Battle for the Future - AI
Musk and X seem to have long since spun out of control. These are not good signs for the avalanche that is currently rolling toward social networks, public communication and democracy as a whole: AI-generated content.
Musk is also involved here. After all, he once co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In 2018, he left, and recently even sued co-founder Sam Altman because the company was no longer developing the technology for the benefit of humanity, but for pure profit.
Publicly, Musk enjoys the role of warning against the dangers of AI. In fact, he has long since launched a new AI company of his own, with a possibly far more dangerous model.
Through xAI, he offers paying X users a generative AI called Grok. The program delivers texts and now also images within seconds. Unlike ChatGPT, for example, there seem to be few moral, ethical or legal boundaries, but answers “to almost any question.” When the latest version of Grok was released in August, users reported that they were able to generate instructions for bomb making and Nazi propaganda without much ado. Or a plan for how a rampage at a school could be made as deadly as possible. In one test, analysts even had the AI draw a picture showing Musk in a classroom - holding an assault rifle.
Musk has since downplayed this, saying Grok is an AI committed to truth and that any errors are being corrected immediately. He touts Grok’s big advantage over the AI competition as the program’s ability to “access X in real time.” However, scientists at Northwestern University near Chicago see this very thing as the danger. “X is not exactly known for its accuracy,” the AI experts write. Musk’s AI could produce “misinformation on a large scale.” Moreover, Grok has no comprehensive safeguards in place to prevent misinformation from spreading uncontrollably.
Examples already exist. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential nomination, Grok spread the false news, shared millions of times, for over a week that candidates could no longer be changed so late in the race. Ministers from five U.S. states complained helplessly to Musk that Grok had lied about the U.S. election process.
Is this the political battlefield of the future? Social networks in which an unrestrained and unbridled AI is at the service of trolls and enemies of democracy, autocrats and despots of any color and provenance, giving them the opportunity to produce lies in unprecedented quantity and convincing quality? Does truth, does democracy even stand a chance against this?
The beauty for Musk is that he can’t even be held liable for such madness.
“The original sin,” says German media scholar Joseph Vogl, currently teaching at Princeton University in the U.S., was the year 1996. That’s when the U.S. government restructured its telecommunications law so that platform operators can no longer be held liable for the content distributed on them - but their users can. The calls for violence and discrimination that exist today on X and at Musk’s behest are an effect of this privilege, he says: “In a democratic media world, this liability privilege would have to be abolished.”
Meanwhile, Musk is creating facts, shifting resources, talent and money from his companies toward xAI for months. He’s building the next big thing, a “computer gigafactory” that’s growing on the site of an old industrial factory on the outskirts of Memphis. Nothing less than the “world’s largest supercomputer” is what it’s supposed to become.
Theoretically, he could one day feed this monstrous machine with the unimaginable mass of data his various companies collect all over the world. For example, the data that his millions of Teslas record daily on the world’s roads. Or the data generated by SpaceX’s rocket launches. Or possibly the data that Neuralink will soon collect from human brains.
Artificial intelligence could be the interface for Elon Musk to connect his previously rather disparate empire. Someone like him has all the resources to be at the forefront of the AI race as well. Especially if he saves everything that makes the technology expensive and complicated: a well-positioned security department that contains the machine and protects humanity. xAI would thus become a powerful central hub in Musk’s empire, a data cockpit at whose control knobs the billionaire himself would sit. Next to him perhaps his buddy Trump. Possibly as president. Duo infernale.
All done.