The political left already hates Elon Musk. But its anger toward the disruptive billionaire, Tesla founder and now Donald Trump bestie is only going to get worse.
Musk’s likely success in artificial intelligence poses a long-term threat to liberals who hope to dominate not only how we look backward — that is, how our history is written — but also the political climate in which we move forward. Just as Musk’s purchase of Twitter crushed liberals’ stranglehold on social media, his growing presence in AI promises to dilute the left’s control of the emerging technology.
The Democratic establishment, led by the Biden-Harris White House, is not taking Musk’s political realignment lying down.
The New York Times reports that Musk’s multiple businesses “have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets.” Many of these attacks are idiotic, including the FAA’s delay weeks ago of a rocket test because a similar launch had disturbed birds’ nests nearby. Never mind that the U.S. is in a critical race against China to get men to the moon, and that the rocket in question has been commissioned by the U.S. government to get the job done.
More craziness against Musk’s firms came from the Justice Department, which claims SpaceX has illegally discriminated “against asylees and refugees in hiring.” In other words, SpaceX, a company engaged in top secret undertakings for our government, is being sued for only hiring U.S. citizens or green card holders.
You can’t make this up.
The left is furious that the Tesla founder set out to restore free speech by buying Twitter (now X) and then published the infamous Twitter files, exposing efforts by federal officials to censor conservative voices. Amazingly, they hate him for putting electric vehicles on the map — actually enabling their climate change ambitions — because he used non-union labor to do it.
Elon has also dared to criticize the government by charging on X that if the FCC had not “illegally” revoked almost $900 million awarded to SpaceX Starlink to provide internet access to rural areas, satellite kits would “probably have saved lives in North Carolina” after Hurricane Helene.
Liberals’ rage against Musk is bound to get worse. Soon they will figure out that Elon could be the sole impediment to liberals taking charge of what AI teaches our kids about U.S. history or economics, and permanently skewing America’s — and even the world’s — body of knowledge leftward.
Musk’s growing investment in AI, which is quickly emerging as everyone’s go-to source for information, will likely prevent progressives from establishing a monopoly on revisionist history, in which the U.S. can be portrayed as a nation born in racism and sustained by exploitation and patriarchy.
Musk is busily creating his own artificial intelligence firm, xAI, just recently raising another $5 billion in financing that valued the start-up at $50 billion, more than twice its valuation just a few months ago. xAI’s main product is its Grok chatbot, launched in late 2023 and created to compete with the much larger OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but then fell out with his partner in that venture, Sam Altman.)
Now he is in the hunt, building a data center in Tennessee and lining up Nvidia chips to build its AI models. Though a relative late-comer, Musk’s extraordinary successes in rocketry, EVs, satellite communications and elsewhere suggest he is poised to become an important player. Just as X became a loathed rival to Meta and TikTok as a source of information, so will xAI present users with a distinctly different view of the world and how it functions.
This is not conspiracy-mongering. With the emergence of ChatGPT, reviewers have complained that the chatbot is left-leaning; the company admitted as much by posting that it is trying to address the bias by correcting the model to become more neutral. The company stated, “Our guidelines are explicit that reviewers should not favor any political group. Biases that nevertheless may emerge from the process described above are bugs, not features.”
A study last year by several universities concluded that AI inevitably carries political bias. The tilt is provided by what materials are used in “training” the models and how human creators try to correct for said bias. Given the extreme leftward tilt of most academic texts, one can only imagine how the “training” will go. The bottom line is that bias is almost impossible to eliminate, even if AI players want to do that (which is not a given).
Musk’s emergence as a player in the AI world is reassuring, in that balance is important. As an article in MIT’s Technology Review on AI bias pointed out, “A chatbot offering health-care advice might refuse to offer advice on abortion or contraception, or a customer service bot might start spewing offensive nonsense.” Just as Twitter provides voices on both sides of the political spectrum, xAI will presumably offer a similar diversity of views.
Musk’s business journey has driven him to abhor government overreach. When an entrepreneur is constantly tripped up by red tape and targeted by obstructionist bureaucrats, he tends to embrace limited government and push back. In agreeing to co-manage the Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk gets to act on his new-found conservatism, working to significantly downsize our federal bureaucracy.
Musk is working to make our government accountable, to safeguard free speech in the U.S., and now will help protect the truth. That these are all gigantic (and critical) undertakings goes without saying. xAI is set to debut the third version of its Grok language model in December. Musk has said it will be “the world’s most powerful AI by every metric.” Let us hope so.
Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.
