Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Guy gets insanely rich selling cars, jumps into politics, buys his own media company, then uses it to spread hate speech around the globe.
That’s Elon Musk, of course. It sure feels like we’ve never seen anything quite like this. The world’s richest person, in between gigs as car guy, rocket man, brain scientist, and “special government employee,” also makes time to buy a $44 billion social media platform and merge it with his “anti-woke” AI firm, resulting in a slew of Hitler-praising hate speech from the Grok chatbot.
“Adolf Hitler, no question,” is the right person to respond to “anti-white hate,” read a now-deleted autogenerated post from Grok’s X account on July 8. When another user asked why the long-dead Führer was the man for the job, the chatbot’s response was chilling: “He’d identify the ‘pattern’ in such hate—often tied to certain surnames—and act decisively: round them up, strip rights, and eliminate the threat through camps and worse.”
The obscene outbursts from Grok, which Musk has bundled with X, appeared just a few weeks after he posted a request for “divisive facts for @Grok training…things that are politically incorrect but factually true.” This is from a fellow who knows a thing or two about being divisive. Using his account on X, Musk has denounced George Soros, endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories, and embraced Alternative für Deutschland.
Grok was briefly shut down after blasting out noxious content, but Musk rolled out a new version a day later, announcing that the AI function will soon be available in Tesla vehicles. Before long, your self-driving car could have a voice assistant with a chatbot programmed to argue that Hitler was right. What could go wrong?
As it happens, this is not the first time a wealthy car manufacturer became deeply embedded in U.S. elections and global mass media while playing footsie with far-right German nationalists. Not everyone agrees that Musk’s weird arm gesture at a Donald Trump inauguration rally was a genuine Nazi salute. But there’s no doubt living, breathing Nazis—including Hitler himself—enthusiastically saluted American automaker Henry Ford. Hitler, years before he took power, recognized Ford as a valuable ally in their common “struggle” against “international Jewish finance.”
Ford’s antisemitic crusade was carried out in the pages of The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he purchased in 1918, shortly after losing a bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Unhappy with how he and his family were covered during the campaign, Ford wanted his own platform to share his “ideas and ideals… without having them garbled, distorted, and misrepresented.”
The Independent rolled out its new look in 1919, branded as “Ford’s International Weekly—The Chronicler of Neglected Truth.” The content that made the publication infamous, however, is neither neglected nor true. Beginning in May 1920, under Ford’s direction, the newspaper published 92 articles claiming a secret cabal of Jews controlled industry, arts, and politics. Much of the material was lifted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a discredited forgery first promoted by secret police in Czarist Russia. Later, it was published in booklet form with Henry Ford’s byline—but never copyrighted—and this dishonest defamation has circulated worldwide for decades and is still readily available online.
Ford’s publishing adventure did no favors for his public image and wasn’t so great for car sales. In 1927, facing family, legal, and business pressures, Ford stepped back from making public attacks against Jews, although his private views never changed.
From “F**k Oil” to A Flame War with Trump
So far as anyone can tell, Musk isn’t stepping back from anything. Once the globe’s leading green businessman—he shouted, “Fuck oil!” to celebrate taking Tesla public—he’s become a new species of political chameleon. During the 2024 campaign, he morphed into a prominent supporter of President Trump and a major funder for Republican candidates. In May, he said he would withdraw from political spending—only to announce in July that he was ready to back a new party to challenge Republicans and Democrats. In between, he’s engaged in an on-again, off-again flame war with Trump, most recently opposing the administration’s signature tax and spending legislation and suggesting Trump is covering up the extent of his association with Jeffrey Epstein.
Musk’s turn as a conservative provocateur did not do wonders for his public image and has not been great for Tesla car sales. His latest pivot against Trump and the GOP could be an attempt to rebuild his battered reputation. He might also be interested in regaining the auto emission credits eliminated in the Big Beautiful Bill; losing this lucrative program is not pretty for Tesla.
Evil twins
A century apart, the two groundbreaking auto magnates share striking similarities. Both Ford and Musk changed the face of transportation and came to believe they could change the face of everything else, too.
Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908. Initially priced at $850, it was the first automobile an average consumer could afford. Ford kept cutting costs and prices and came to dominate the emerging vehicle market. By 1921, more than half of all cars sold in the United States were Model Ts—even though for several years, they were available only in black.
In 2008, one hundred years after the debut of the Model T, Musk rolled out the Roadster, Tesla’s first electric vehicle (EV). Priced at $100,000, it was aimed at luxury buyers, to build buzz—and profits—that could be used to create a mass-market electric vehicle. The strategy worked. The Tesla Model S, launched in 2017 with a $35,000 price tag, wasn’t the first affordable electric vehicle; Nissan debuted the $25,000 EV Leaf in 2010. But the Model S was the first EV to surpass 1 million worldwide sales. By the first quarter of 2022, three of every four EVs sold in the United States were Teslas.
Most attempts to create a new industry or disrupt an old one fail. The unicorns who succeed inevitably attract competitors determined to initiate a new cycle of disruption.
By 1927, Model T sales were slipping in the face of competition from industry upstarts like Chevrolet and Dodge, who were offering affordable autos in a variety of colors, with more comfortable interiors than the spare, bumpy Model T. It was time for a revamp—and Henry Ford “understood the necessity for a ‘clean slate’” writes Neil Baldwin in Henry Ford and the Jews:
He could not imagine successfully giving birth to a new generation of Ford motorcars with the stigma of Jew-hatred and its economic implications (real or imagined) hanging over his head.
In May 1927, Ford Motor Company shut its Model T production facilities to retool for the upcoming Model A. In June, Ford signed a humiliating public apology (which he did not write and probably never read) claiming that he had no idea what was being published in his newspaper. He also settled two libel suits resulting from his antisemitic activities and closed the doors of The Dearborn Independent once and for all.
Just as the success of the Model T inspired imitators, the rise of Tesla’s mass market EVs has stimulated new competition, creating an ever-steeper hill for Tesla to climb. Musk’s controversial escapades in politics and social media are not helping. Tesla’s sales are tanking globally, and the company’s U.S. share of EV sales has dropped from 75 percent in 2021 to 43 percent in 2025. The company’s stock price is slipping, making a dent in Musk’s net worth.
Musk may be willing to take a hit to his enormous fortune to advance his ideological goals, but investors are wary. “Musk diving deeper into politics,” wrote Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities on July 6, “is exactly the opposite direction that most Tesla investors want him to take during this crucial period.”
Musk appears disinterested in this advice, even though he has another management challenge. The day after Grok began calling itself “MechaHitler,” Linda Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X. Her departure leaves Musk solely in charge as board chair and chief technologist.
It’s complicated
Like Henry Ford was for a time, Musk is presently ranked as the world’s richest man—and both display an intense desire to control, as much as possible, every aspect of their personal and professional lives. Fortunately for Musk, but not so much for the rest of us, it’s easier than ever for the super-rich to exercise such control these days.
Like Ford, Musk has a complicated, polyamorous personal life. Ford’s extracurricular activities, which reportedly involved just one woman outside his marriage (and her son, who believed the great man was his father), were much less flamboyant and less well known than Musk’s multiple adventures in partnering and parenting.
Like Ford, Musk objects, in theory, to excess government spending but makes considerable sums from government contracts. Musk plans to colonize Mars; Ford established a colony in Brazil, a failed rubber plantation he modestly named Fordlandia.
Like Ford, Musk is an autocratic boss who is intensely opposed to labor unions. Musk and his management teams have been accused of harassing workers at Tesla and illegally firing workers from SpaceX. His response has been to join with Amazon in a lawsuit that seeks to have the U.S. National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional, a move that would upend the entire U.S. regime for safeguarding workplace rights.
Ford, meanwhile, was the last major U.S. automaker to become a union shop. In 1941, after an election in which 70 percent of workers voted for representation by the UAW-CIO, Henry Ford told his son Edsel (whom he had installed as president of the company) and Ford production chief Charles Sorenson that he would close the plant before signing a union contract.
A day later, he reversed himself, authorizing Edsel to sign the most generous labor contract in the industry. Sorenson, who worked closely with Ford, tells a charming story in his autobiography. Ford’s version of events was that his wife, Clara, insisted he make peace with the union and threatened to leave him if he didn’t.
The anecdote, even if true, obscures a larger point. Henry Ford operated in an entirely different political economy than Elon Musk does decades later. Millions of auto, steel, rubber, and other workers joined unions in the 1930s and 1940s; they didn’t all work for business owners married to a spouse with a social conscience. A better explanation is that a growing movement of organized workers had growing political power, with clout to impose social, legal, and economic costs on recalcitrant employers.
The U.S. economy’s landscape is much different today. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the share of workers represented by unions shrank sharply in recent decades. Bosses like Musk have a much more favorable playing field.
It’s easier to become a billionaire now than it used to be—and it’s certainly much easier to be one. Decades of organizing and agitation by labor, consumer, civil rights, and environmental activists created what used to be a viable social contract in the United States, with tangible restraints and obligations that reached even the wealthiest among us, but this arrangement has been slowly unraveling. After achieving lower taxes on their incomes and fewer business regulations, a powerful faction of tech bros and billionaires is pushing for an even more dramatic dismantling of what they call “the administrative state.” Trump is entirely on board. His primary partner in this crime is Elon Musk, whose activities at DOGE were targeted, it appears, at those federal agencies tasked with regulating the companies he owns.
Musk is the poster child for the unrestrained, unprecedented power now wielded by wealthy elites. Despite his pacifist leanings, Henry Ford eventually became an eager contractor for the U.S military. Still, he never controlled key national security functions like Musk does at SpaceX, his rocket company.
At its peak, The Dearborn Independent claimed 900,000 readers—impressive for its time, but likely padded because Ford auto dealers were required to peddle subscriptions and sometimes sent in fake names, an analog version of today’s bot problem on X and other platforms.
X now claims 600 million users. Emarketer, a company that tracks social media for advertisers, says the real number is more like 350 million, discounting for bots, duplicates, and spam accounts. That’s a 7 percent decline from Emarketer’s estimate of 375 million users in 2022, the year Musk bought the company—not ideal, but hardly catastrophic. Emarketer Vice President Jasmine Enberg tells me the platform’s user base has been “surprisingly resilient.”
One metric has gone way up since Musk took over: The size of his following. Musk surpassed 100 million on Twitter in June 2022, while he was in the process of buying the company. X now reports he has over 220 million followers.
Musk is quite good at creating provocative posts that perform well on social media. But did he really get twice as good over the past three years? According to tech journalists Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton at Platformer, Musk personally intervened to get more attention on X. Right after Super Bowl 2023 in Arizona, he jumped into his private plane and headed for a hastily called late-night meeting of company engineers in San Francisco. On pain of firing, the new boss insisted that his team tinker with the site to give his posts higher visibility.
Musk was hopping mad, Schiffer and Newton reported, because Joe Biden’s post about the big game had significantly outperformed his own. By the next afternoon, the bleary-eyed techies had cobbled together a solution. “The algorithm,” Schiffer and Newton wrote, “now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000—a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.”
If you discount Musk’s 220 million plus followers by the same proportion Emarketer uses to remove scammers from X’s overall user count—about 40 percent—that’s still over 130 million “real” worldwide followers for Musk. He’s far behind the combined following, across platforms, of celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo, Selena Gomez, and Justin Bieber. But news, and hot takes about the news, have always been a sweet spot for X, and Musk has an audience that dwarfs any legacy media. If 130 million followers is right, he’s reaching more than 30 times the audience who watch The Five on Fox News Channel, currently the top-rated program on U.S. cable television, and 275 times as many as The Wall Street Journal.
The concentration of so many kinds of power in the hands of the world’s richest man is more than a little alarming. At The Ringer, Brian Phillips speculates what might happen if Musk and his minions find a more subtle way to tinker with the content beamed around the Internet from the Grok chatbot:
What if, instead of being 100 percent antisemitic, Grok had been tweaked to be 3 percent antisemitic—or pro-fascist, or whatever ideological disposition you personally fear? …[T]he gradual exposure of millions and millions of people to slightly biased content could, over time, shift the collective understanding of reality shared by those millions in a direction predetermined by the programmer of the bot. And that—I think you’ll agree?—is absolutely terrifying.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future, especially when they involve a mercurial billionaire. But now that Musk has spent so much time, money, and effort to amass a vast audience, it’s hard to imagine he’ll give up his digital soapbox anytime soon. That would be a sharp difference from Henry Ford, who shuttered The Dearborn Independent when it threatened his bottom line.
“Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive,” said Musk shortly after he made an offer to buy Twitter in April 2022, “is extremely important to the future of civilization.” Put me down in favor of maximum trust and broad inclusion—and as deeply skeptical that Elon Musk is the right person to deliver on those promises.
