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How Elon Musk’s xAI is quietly taking over X

It looks like X is no longer Elon Musk’s favorite child.

When Elon Musk launched his own AI startup, xAI, he touted a key advantage over his competitors: access to the vast trove of data from his newly acquired social media platform Twitter. Not long after X rolled out the Grok-powered Stories feature, it began spitting out garbage: it produced headlines that claimed Vice President Kamala Harris was shot after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump; misunderstood a bunch of shitposts about New York Mayor Eric Adams, saying he deployed 50,000 police officers to an earthquake; and erroneously claimed in an AI-generated headline “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.” (Grok, obviously, isn’t the only AI service with this problem.) His dream of making it into an “everything app” has failed to materialize, the plans to launch payment features have stalled, advertisers continue to flee from Musk’s controversies, and upstarts like Bluesky and Threads threaten X’s dominance.

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