Why won't someone do something about Elon Musk?
Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is about Elon Musk and Grok, Twitter’s C.S.A.M.-generating feature.A reminder: Read Max is almost wholly funded by readers. I spend my week reading and thinking and researching and writing, both for that week’s newsletter and for future newsletters, and I can only do that kind of work with the proper dedication because enough people pay for this to be a full-time job. If you value the work I do here--if you read this newsletter and feel as though it helps you understand the world better, or at least pass the time more pleasantly--please consider becoming a paid subscriber. At $5/month or $50/year, think of it as buying me a cheap beer or latte drink every month.When Elon Musk was forced by courts to complete his ill-advised purchase of Twitter in the fall of 2022, he promised to turn the microblogging website into “X, the Everything app”--news! Debate! Video! Job listings! Banking … ? … Dating? In the three years since, very little of this promised product roadmap has been completed. But that’s not to say that X.com engineers have been twiddling their thumbs in the meantime!Take, for example, “Grok,” X.com’s proprietary, resource-intensive on-demand deepfake-kiddie-porn generator, which has finally found what Silicon Valley calls “product-market fit” over the past 10 days: Anonymous users have flocked to the “Grok” sub-site of X.com in order to edit images of unwitting women and children into skimpy bathing suits and highly sexualized poses at a rate of roughly 160,000 images a day. You cannot bank, properly speaking, on X.com. But you can generate, in public, with a few strokes of your keys, child sexual abuse material at scale:Musk’s main response to his C.S.A.M. product’s recent popularity has been to express his trademark giddy dim-wittedness, and to otherwise ignore it. On Monday, the influencer and former Musk paramour Ashley St. Clair told the The Guardian that even she, the mother of one of Musk’s children, was unable to escalate her complaints or get prompt satisfaction when an underage picture of herself was Grokified.Elsewhere, reviews of the feature have been … mixed. The company is now being investigated by the European Commission and authorities in Malaysia and India following a barrage of negative coverage in those countries. But other authorities--such as Keir Starmer’s government in the U.K.--have seemed hesitant to address the obvious wrongdoing, let alone ban an app that is likely creating criminal liability for any person uses it, even as they acknowledge the problem:And the Republican government in the U.S.--and even many leading Democrats!--have remained entirely silent despite X’s clear legal liability in leaving C.S.A.M. and other “nonconsensual… intimate visual depictions of individuals” up on its site. (Not to mention the liability of its users.) Institutional American media has been similarly (and strangely) slow to cover a story that you could accurately summarize as “the single largest Republican donor refuses to shut down his industrial C.S.A.M. generation-distribution machine”--as of Tuesday night the only mention of the feature on the Times website was a stray line in a story otherwise about xAI raising $20 billion in investment capital.To some extent Musk and the perverts who love him have been lucky to reach product-market fit for Grok over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, when both journalists and politicians are doing whatever they can do avoid work. But it seems clear too that something else is going on--a kind of uncertainty about how to, or if, to cover the story at all.John Herrman’s recent column at Intel about X.com’s domination of the A.I. discourse is instructive, even though he wrote too early to include the C.S.A.M.-generating features:Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world’s understanding of what’s going on in Silicon Valley right now — the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress — is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk.As John and the A.I. researcher and commentator Colin Fraser elaborated on Bluesky, it’s not just “A.I. discourse” in the abstract but “A.I. media coverage” in the specific that’s shaped by the culture and values of X.com, where the horrible possibility of a Woke A.I. that produces images of black female popes (or whatever) outranks a Based A.I. that produces images of underaged girls in sexualized poses on the threat scale. (As John suggests, you can genealogically trace this bizarre model of “harm” back through the influential Rationalist site LessWrong’s mystic utilitarianism and its millenarian fear of misguided machine superintelligence.)So journalists and editors who take their cues for coverage from X.com are going to find themselves thrown by the site’s value system, as are politicians similarly captured by X.com’s approximation of “the discourse”--an old problem of social media compounded here by an ongoing willful obscurantism on the part of the A.I. industry about where responsibility and accountability lies (or should lie) in situations where L.L.M.s enable or cause actual harm.But there is, in addition, a ketamine-addled elephant in the room where we’re wondering why the C.S.A.M. machine isn’t a bigger deal: Elon Musk himself. Over the past decade-plus, the South African billionaire freak has been all too happy to quite publicly leverage both his money and his formidable marketing talents not just in service of his own interests but to attack perceived and actual enemies. Many people in positions of power avoid doing or saying anything about Elon Musk for the same reason no one ever tweets anything negative about K-Pop or Taylor Swift: Any politician, publisher, or prosecutor hoping to hold him to account has to contend with the punishing experience of having Elon Musk, and his thousands of paid and unpaid flunkies, fans, and hangers-on, focus monomaniacally on you. Put bluntly:Knowing that Musk has already interfered significantly in U.K. politics--funding right-wing agitator Tommy Robinson’s legal bills, attempting to make himself a political kingmaker, threatening large donations to Nigel Farage, and acting in general as a clearinghouse for reactionary propaganda about the U.K. specifically--and you can understand why Kier Starmer might be hesitant to directly address X.com’s generative-C.S.A.M. business model. The same goes, in a general sense, in the U.S., where Republicans (like, say TAKE IT DOWN Act sponsor Ted Cruz!) might worry about Musk funding a primary opponent, or attempting to use X.com’s secondary “public communications” function to marshal opposition and harassment.But how scary, or powerful, is Elon Musk, really? One lesson of the year since Trump’s election and inauguration (perhaps a lesson to be drawn from the past decade in general) is that elites and managers in politics and media are still quite slow to recognize the rapid shifts in political capital and public opinion that characterize our current era--a lag in realization and action enabled and exacerbated by social-media myopia. Politicians in particular seem to still cling to an image of Elon Musk as an unstoppable force who cannot be challenged, but nothing suggests that the reality of Musk’s power matches the reputation. It’s true, he’s a billionaire; but so too are many people subject to criticism, coverage, and even, sometimes, arrest. His actual track record since the 2024 election is quite bad: His interventions in European politics have had an at best marginal effect. In addition to the DOGE fiasco--admittedly, a substantive win but not a political one--Musk’s attempt to sway the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year was a pretty unmitigated failure, and his brief attempt to launch a third party last summer was no more successful than his attempt to make X.com a competitor to LinkedIn. He’s an unpopular and polarizing figure, and, as Ettingermentum recently pointed out (while naming Musk the #1 political loser of 2025), he was easily and harmlessly booted from the Trump administration when the president got annoyed by him:There are several volumes worth of books to be written about all of the countless ways he embarrassed himself during this period, so I’ll just stress what I believe to be the most important (and devastating) point: that Trump faced absolutely zero political repercussions on his right flank after he canned his onetime friend. Instead, it was Elon himself who saw his popularity plummet even further after Trump told his supporters that he was now the enemy. As of today, he is such a clear political liability as an individual that most pollsters don’t even bother to include him in their personal favorability polls.Where Musk’s real power lies, and what makes him politically dangerous to confront directly, is not (as may have been the case just a few years ago) in his charisma or his money, or even his control of the flows of attention on X.com. It’s that he’s made the site--the essential global reactionary communication and organization app--co-extensive to himself. Even as his personal popularity has plummeted and his political capital has vaporized, Musk remains a key man to the global right-wing project, because X.com would collapse (or be moderated out of useful existence) without him. Republicans and right-wing parties across Europe have no choice but to defend him to the death, for fear of losing an essential source of attention and parade of marks for their grifts.Unlike the Trump administration, which could survive a post-Musk world, X.com has no choice but to keep Musk in charge. But Musk himself is not popular, has no juice, no aura, no special ability. The fact that he is lashed existentially to X.com and therefore to the right wing at large is as much a liability for the site and the reactionary project it houses as it is a asset to him. His site, and its dedicated users, are breaking laws in dozens of countries, and his only response has been to joke about it. Someone should do something about that. There’s nothing to be afraid of and there’s no reason not to.
