Name: ‘Full Nazi’: Elon Musk's AI chatbot started calling itself 'MechaHitler'
Uploaded: 2025-07-16T14:12:46.000Z
Duration: 6 min 10 s
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Among all the other things happening at X today, the company's CEO, a woman named Linda Yaccarino, announced she's leaving after just two years on the job.

In a lengthy post, Yaccarino wrote, quote, When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company.

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I'm immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around and transforming X into the everything app.

Elon Musk simply responded, quote, Thank you for your contributions.

After Musk bought the site, Yaccarino was brought in to be the adult in the room, I guess, but she may have gotten more than she bargained for with her boss's rants, a platform that seems to court right-wing extremists, and a high-profile AI chatbot that refers to itself as Mecca Hitler.

Brian Barrett is the executive editor of News at Wired, which has done extensive coverage of Grok, Elon Musk, and he joins me now.

Brian, let me first start on the Yaccarino news and the question of whether we know if her departure was at all related to the extraordinary and appalling meltdown of the Grok AI system yesterday.

You know, I'll say first that we don't know.

You could certainly see how it might be the last straw, but I will say there were plenty of other straws before this that could have been the last one.

If you're not leaving over the white genocide incident that you mentioned that happened in May, you know, this is worse, but it's all pretty bad.

I think there are some other factors to consider here.

It got absorbed by the AI company that Elon Musk also owns, so her role is diminished there.

And also, she came in as someone who could make nice with advertisers, bring them back to the platform.

Now that X is evolving into, A, an everything app with payments and who knows what else, and B, an AI forward Mecca Hitler app, it's less clear what her role would be.

So it makes sense that she would like, it makes sense that she would head out now, but I don't know that you could say this is the one thing where she finally said enough is enough.

Okay, let's talk about what happened with Grok.

I was sort of horrified and fascinated in equal measure.

I mean, it's clear that, I mean, there's a thing that happens on X all the time, which is there'll be something and then Grok will fact check it and seem to be kind of a liberal or correct right wing misinformation.

And then all the right wing people on the app get so mad at it.

So do we actually, A, do we know why this happened?

And B, how, why it took them so long to put a stop to it?

Well, in terms of why it happened, I think you can look at, you mentioned before, they added these system prompts that said, don't shy away from politically incorrect material.

And there was another one there, too, that said, don't necessarily trust the media, media sources.

So that combined was a factor, certainly.

But then also you got to remember that these AI models, when your knowledge base, when your training data comprises the entirety of the Internet, there's a lot of really bad stuff on the Internet, which we all know.

So when you don't put in the right guardrails or when you remove guardrails, it's garbage in, garbage out.

I think any of these AI models, if you let them run rampant, that's probably what they'll do.

That's why companies spend so much money trying to prevent this from happening.

I mean, to me, the part that was fascinating, right, is to the degree to which, you know, the system prompt was don't worry about things that are politically incorrect.

And then you train this LLM on all the content, the Internet that it just took that prompt.

That like the sort of neural network mapping of the conceptual deep meaning of don't be politically incorrect is go full Hitler at the level of the of the model itself.

We want to be a little bit careful because we don't know for sure.

Like there may be stuff going on behind the scenes.

There may be some other tweaks that are made, but fundamentally, yes, I think it's at least speaks to the ethos of, hey, we're going to let you run a little bit wild.

You're going to take several miles in this case.

What what's what is the success level of X?

I feel like it was clear it was losing a ton of revenue.

When Trump got elected, there was a sort of sense that like the administration and X would successfully sort of bully advertisers to come back to the platform.

There was even reporting about, you know, administration officials doing that FTC investigation into possible conspiracy to obstruct trade.

You know, I think when you talk about the success level of X, it's important not to get too caught up in dollars and cents.

I think it's it's clearly lost a ton of users.

It's clearly not a happy place for advertisers.

I thought it was interesting that Linda Carino said that she had done so much to restore advertiser trust.

But I think a success for X is really how much can advance Elon Musk's agenda?

How much can it be his personal playground?

How much can you use it as a lever for power?

And I think clearly it's done that in space.

And so I, you know, monetarily probably lost, but he's got 200 billion dollars.

He doesn't care that much, I would imagine.

And it's still a really great place for him to hang out with his like minded buddies.

And his personal AI, Brian Barrett at Wired, which I have to say has been doing some of the finest reporting in this Trump administration.

I read you guys constantly on a subscriber and you're doing amazing work.

So thank you for all the work you guys are doing out there.