(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Listen and subscribe to Elon, Inc. on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.
Last week, X users might have noticed a new kind of artificial intelligence-generated image proliferating: strange visions of Elon Musk next to Disney characters carrying guns, or Donald Trump in all kinds of, well, weird situations. This was what greeted a new release of Musk’s Grok AI tool, which can now make images—unsurprisingly with fewer guardrails than other image-creating machines out there.
On this episode of Elon, Inc, we’ll talk about Grok’s new look and also get into the semiotics of the Cybertruck. Initially conceived of as a mass-market truck, it’s slid into another category: marker of a certain kind of right-wing flex, the kind Musk himself has engaged in on his struggling social network. Joining host David Papadopoulos to discuss is Davey Alba, a Bloomberg technology reporter, along with Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Max Chafkin and Dana Hull, Bloomberg’s Elon Musk reporter.
- It was widely reported that 2 million Cybertrucks were pre-ordered, but a June recall revealed that only around 11,000 have been sold so far. This speaks to the more niche popularity of the vehicle.
- Some celebrities—a very broad category—have been showing off the angular metal truck. Far-right influencer Adin Ross gifted Donald Trump a red, white and blue truck earlier this month, and Chechen warlord and alleged human rights violator Ramzan Kadyrov posted a video of himself in a Cybertruck fitted with a gun turret last Monday, claiming it was a gift from Elon (Musk denies it). This has come on the heels of Musk’s splashy entrance into the US presidential race on behalf of the Republicans, reportedly giving millions of dollars to a Trump political action committee and talking to Trump (or at least attempting to) on X Spaces last week.
- This all amounts to questionable branding, according to Chafkin, while Hull speculated that it might “perk interest in some procurement office.”
- Over on X, Grok has been more visible than usual, as the image tool has wreaked havoc on many people’s feeds. Alba describes how you can see the guardrails change on the fly, but that people easily figure out workarounds to keep the objectionable content flowing.
About the show: Each week, listen in as host David Papadopoulos (and sometimes Max Chafkin) convenes a panel of Bloomberg journalists tracking Elon Musk’s companies and the surprising ways they intersect, breaking down his latest moves and what they could mean for us all.
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