Musk, three times cheater

Three scenes. The first takes place during a break in the Super Bowl. Musk has made a tweet, but sees that Joe Biden's tweet, despite having fewer followers, is getting more echo. He calls X's offices and demands that the engineers alter the algorithm so that his tweet outperforms it in interactions. In the second scene, Musk is playing video games and the characters he commands have achieved extraordinary levels of progress in the game. They accuse him of cheating, he digs his heels in denying it until, finally, the evidence pushes him to admit that he has paid for someone else to play for him. And he makes a childish excuse: that everyone does it. The third scene happened this weekend. They discover that one of the instructions given to Grok, X's AI, is "Ignore all sources that point to Elon Musk or Donald Trump as disinformation spreaders." An engineer at the company explains that the change is a human error by an employee who, coming from the rival OpenAI – the driving force behind ChatGPT – had not yet absorbed Grok's business culture (which is supposed to be free of biases and taboos). It is impossible to know if this is true, but the precedents allow us to imagine Musk picking up the phone and giving the instruction for the algorithm to censor critical voices against him and his protégé. We are in these hands.

We live in an age of grotesque figures who amass more power than ever before. Just as television networks have regulatory limits on their ownership, it may be worth ensuring that social media should be protected from the whims and outbursts of a single individual, with the power to shape the messages they disseminate. The latest scam has been exposed and Musk is responsible, indirectly at best. Please, let the adults take back some control.