Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades.

Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.

The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).

Higher value AI company? Not for long if "mechahitler" keeps popping up.

Honestly, after years of hearing that Elon's mishaps and faceplants will actually have a meaningful impact, with no meaningful impact, I'm sure xAI will be fine as long as they stay somewhat competitive.

Isn't that the point though? In a market of multiple competently-executed chatbots, a entrant whose distinguishing feature is edgelordism isn't likely to stay competitive. There is a market for "like the other chat bots in terms of parsing instructions, but with clumsy ad hoc prompting to make it generate more racist output rather than less racist output" but it isn't a particularly lucrative one Cf Musk's other businesses with lockin effect or massive technical advantages, and in some cases where his politics are largely irrelevant

Investors are insane throwing money at elon's xai at a $75 billion valuation. And knowing that elon is probably taking their cash to pay twitter's debt. How is that possible? That shitty also-ran mechahitler ai is never going to make any money. It makes me suspect that a lot of these VCs are more political than rational.

> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.

I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p

I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.

NPR found that they really didn't lose much:

https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l...

But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles.

And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.

NPR's audience is very different from mine (AI researchers and thinkers) though. Some communities seem to have managed the move wholesale: all the cartoonists I like switched, for example.

> and thinkers

Your audience is pretentious people I guess?

The "thinker" is one of the main audiences of twitter now.

The Statue PFP, incorrect assumptions about the path, and extreme dunning kruger.

By the time I left I was deleting multiple bot followers a day. You cannot take X's claims at face value, everything about the platform is aggressively dishonest. NPR's experience is instructive: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/

I don't think it's realistic to pretend that abandoning X is seriously restricting anyone. If anything, sticking with it is brand endangerment and by leaving it you're making the smart move, with or without animus.

Are you really? I found my personal network got pretty much shredded. At this point it doesn’t matter much if I used X or didn’t use it.

They liked the gesture. The rationalization is just public pretending they would theoretically mind.

I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.

In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.

I am sorry WHAT not?

I'd love to know a reason why not to use an iPhone because of Apple's leader. Is he not right wing enough like Musk?

We all have our ideas on politics. Not all ideas are as universal as some think or pretend.

"Nazis are bad" ought to be pretty damn universal.

We're not talking "has different ideas about corporate taxation or environmental regulation" like, say, Mitt Romney.

The Roman Empire engaged in genocide and slavery against many of their adversaries, yet Rome is still viewed as the peak of ancient civilization. The USSR imprisoned millions and caused the deaths of tens of millions more, yet leftists try focusing on the free healthcare and education. The United States engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native Americans, yet given enough time, such crimes have faded in saliency. Manifest Destiny was actually the inspiration for Hitler's ideas of lebensraum, invasion of Russia, and genocide of the Slavs. If Hitler had won he probably would have been considered more akin to Caesar or Napoleon. History is written by the victors and all that.

Ancient Rome is history, not an example to follow.

Connecting the USSR with free health care and education is, uh, "nice try, but completely wide of the mark". We have free education in the US after all, as do most wealthy countries. Denmark and Italy are night and day from the USSR politically and economically.

I think you can both recognize that the past of the US has some very ugly moments while still thinking the ideals were directionally correct and that we should attempt to live up to them.

This feels like a lot of putting positions onto a group for them in order to discount their beliefs.

Most left left left folk that I know have zero idealization about Rome or the USSR, and haven’t forgotten the atrocities the US has committed both home and abroad.

Anyone who seriously talks about the Roman Empire without wrestling with the realities of it is putting their head in the sand.

Anyone pining for the USSR probably doesn’t know a lot of what went on during its existence. Similarly most people actually wanting some form of communism or socialism probably don’t mean “just like the USSR”.

Right. And in my idea of politics, people who are willing to tolerate Nazis in social company are completely and utterly morally compromised.

I think all Nazis should be socially shunned. I think all those willing to knowingly socialize with Nazis should also be socially shunned.

Calling people names to dehumanize them is a page from the Nazi playbook.

20 years of anti-fascists who are jealous that some other people have better footwear calling wolf was a magic spell that brought real fascists into existence.

(If you had to say what was wrong about Twitter in a short text it is that it is easy to say something like the above message in a short text but impossible to conclusively refute as it involves introducing concepts such as "The meaning of a communication is its effect", "The purpose of a system is what it does", "Chaos Magick is real", and that even though physics is real some things obey the laws of 'pataphysics instead.)

For sure, hence the question...

Not using a website full of time wasting shit because it empowers and profits a literal Nazi presently helping destroy America seems like a pretty minimal ask.

> literal Nazi

I didn't know Musk was a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party and is campaigning for minorities to go in gas chambers.

Your feigned ignorance does not detract from the evidence (which if presented you will undoubtably deny is compelling, of course)

Please show me evidence that Musk is a member of the nazi party.

> Please show me evidence that Musk is a member of the nazi party.

I see that you replaced nazi claims with the strawman of "member of the nazi party".

I guess downplaying roman salutes, or antisemitic propaganda talking points, is too low key.

All you have to do is watch Musk on video for 5 minutes and you can easily notice his body language is quite severely impaired, which is a tell tell sign of autism. If Musk supported the democrats, no one would of battered an eyelid over it.

We shouldn't start permitting ableism just because we don't agree with someone politically. I don't agree with Musk on most things, I don't resort to insulting his appearance, speech etc.

He's not a member of the Nazi Party. The Nazi party hasn't existed in a long time. At this point in time, "literal Nazi" cannot mean, contextually, direct subservience to Adolph Hitler. He's dead.

He's a member of a loose collection of white nationalist and "neo-Nazi" belief circles, and has promoted the modern counterpart to the Nazi ideology, the AFD, "urging them to move beyond guilt about their past".

Notably, he's not as fully committed to nativism or racial purity as some of his counterparts; He unilaterally caused a bit of a split in the GOP due to his need to rely on H1B labor, and we have hours-long recordings of his discussions & arguments with other people in this ideological cluster on Twitter Live.

For someone to be a literal nazi, to meet the "literal" part they must either be a member of a nazi party or subscribe to beliefs of them.

You can and should criticise Musk for his actions and views, especially his populist dogma, but calling him a nazi in hyperbole is a disrespect to the actual victims of Nazis, especially as anti semitism is alive and kicking again.

I personally believe Musk knows next to nothing about European politics, and his random support for people is more about rocking the boat and "trolling" the establishment than any meaningful support as he once did to Trump.

Actual victims of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Laura Loomer are literally being gathered off the streets thousands at a time and sent to concentration camps.

Call it trolling all you like, but we just funded our immigration enforcement agency at a level consistent with being one the larger militaries in the world.

Adolph Hitler's partisan ideology, to the extent that it different from general German ideology at the time, was a phenomenon from 1919 to 1945. The Holocaust death camps range from 1942 to 1945.

If you're examining "Ideology" from a behavioral lens, you don't get to look at behavior analogous to the Nazis in the 1930's and excuse it as "Not Nazi Enough".

If you're examining "Ideology" as explicit/implicit endorsement by reference, that's happening too, regardless of whether you want to wrap it in layers of irony. Elon Musk just set his large AI company's flagship up as a 4chan/pol/ member that calls itself "Mecha-Hitler" and offers explicit, detailed antisemitic critiques; This is not even the first time (see the South African Genocide).

If you want to see the character of these people, prove it in the breach - listen to him argue with his collection of ethnonationalist sycophants on Twitter about whether he should be allowed to hire Indian slave labor to run his tech.

Your motte appears to be that the use of the word "Nazi" must refer to a direct continuation of the political party of Adolph Hitler as passed down through partisan rules of succession, for the usage of "literally", as opposed to either of these frames. I reject this pedantry as motivated reasoning. This term has power and that power is needed because shit's going down again in similar ways.

In critiquing a cartoon not produced by Disney as derivative, "He's a sort of Mickey Mouse" might describe any number of cartoon characters that give off the same vibe, versus saying "He's literally Mickey Mouse" describes a blatant ripoff or even actionable IP violation. Obviously these people are not being selected for office by the Fuhrer, and "Literally" has a useful meaning here separate from that designation.

Whereas "Nazi" might be diluted into common hyperbole over the decades, "Literal Nazi" stands as essential terminology to refer to somebody who endorses ideas compatible with Umberto Eco's list, who puts into practice Roger Griffin's "Palingenetic ultranationalism", who scapegoats an ethnic minority to the point of advocating violent action, while at the same time adopting & hanging out with those adopting some of the symbology of the historical German fascist state.

Even the literal literal Nazis didn’t campaign for minorities to be sent to gas chambers. If you’re going to do this silly pedantic act about how no-one in 2025 can literally be a Nazi, at least do it right.

"literal Nazi" What utter nonsense.

If it quacks like a duck.

Why would someone who isn't a Nazi do a nazi salute TWICE in public? Why is Grok spewing antisemitic garbage?

What probably puzzles me the most is the cowardice of multi-billion dollar corporations developing AI, whose main goal is to make sure that no one, God forbid, is offended by a chat bot

They are really ready to castrate their models to the point of complete uncompetitiveness, but without any mean words in 0.01% of use cases. WTF? Is it because all people are complete idiots? Or because they think that all people are complete idiots? Or do they think that the jews running media is hypocritical scumbags who are ready to destroy them for the sake of activism and, most importantly, have enough power to do it, as soon as they see something unpleasant in their chatbot?

Why doesn't anyone come out and say openly "this is a language model, a computer program that, like any other language model, is not designed to speak on behalf of the company or describe the real world. And if you are afraid of stumbling upon a mean word, please contact any of our competitors with their weak castrated soyjak models, thank you very much"

Do you think that reprogramming a smart model to the point where it produces Hitler takes is any better?

I'm not going to use a LLM that praises Hitler but you do you.

There was no nazi salute. I watched the video before and after, and it was just a hand waving.

Try watching it not as a clip, but 5 minutes around. If that's a nazi salute, then thousands of celebrities over the decades have done it too.

Grok? Be serious. This is childish. I suppose Larry Page is racist, because Google called pictutes of black people monkeys once?

US politics is inane.

People need to drop personal attacks, especially made up ones, and focus on the issues.

Oh no, nazis!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ1IfBr...

https://images.app.goo.gl/vfwu1

Obama the nazi! https://images.app.goo.gl/hhYZx

https://images.app.goo.gl/s4a5E

I could literally find millions if I wanted.

Dumbest thing ever.

He knew what he was doing, and he knew people would say "what about Obama" or whatever. This is not the first time Musk has violated a societal norm for attention, he just went way too far this time.

Well, right wing lovers at work have asked me to take down sarcastic images of elon musk doing a "totally not nazi" salute, just in case someone who voted for trump might be offended.

He didn't just extend his arm, the whole motion matters. I am having a hard time believing you are arguing in good faith.

Yes, the whole motion matters. I've seen lots of historical documentaries with footage, and I've never seen a nazi salute with that motion.

You have to really work at it, to think Elon made such a salute, but others have not. It's ridiculous and absurd.

When I see and hear mad lunacy amd character assassination such as this, I immediately think "well everything else said about Elon must be made up too"

You speak of "good faith", do you know what this means?

It means that best intentions should be presumed, not worst, when examining the acts of others.

Have you done this?

" and I've never seen a nazi salute with that motion."

That is interesting because Musk's salute is so identical to Hitler's including timing he must of practiced it.

Can't reply to the parent comment directly, but no, they're not arguing in good faith. The Wikipedia article has a gif of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy

That wasn't a wave and the other commenter is full of shit.

There is also the REALLY strange expression he has on his face when he does it. No one has that expression when just "waving"

My heart goes out to you.

> Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think (...)

Is it though? I mean, this reads like the social media version of "If there's a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with eleven Nazis."

I don't care if you're on Twitter commenting pictures of cats. If you're on Twitter normalizing and validating white supremacists and outright fascists and sanctioning their hate speech platform, you are contributing to the problem.

>"If there's a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with eleven Nazis."

Change nazi for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.

Different words mean different things.

"Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.

If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?

If we're going by objectively terrible things to be, even though the definition of nazi is very loose to now mean anyone to the right of far left because of it's overuse.

The Nazi bar argument does not do itself any favours and is in ways self-defeating. The majority do not care what someone else's political views are and arguments that shame people for doing so will just lead to increases in populism.

If you are a regular at a bar of a well known nazi, you're a nazi.

> If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?

If that guy is a regular known for being a vocal supporter and often engages in discussions in said bar with attendees over how right he is and how reasonable his opinions are, and you still decide to stay and engage in those discussions still without thinking there is anything wrong with that... yeah, you are.

Account created 3 days ago with the sole purpose of trolling.

Nazi is a noun.

Also try swapping in the word “criminal” and you’ll understand the argument being made.

Swap it for vegan. Or cricketer. Or beekeeper.

If anyone is in fact confused instead of being purposefully obtuse, the point being made that being a Nazi (like being a member of a criminal conspiracy) has the attribute of conveying responsibility to those who associate with the group.

And I’m saying I disagree. I don’t need to associate with someone else’s political beliefs to sit with them. Unless you go around asking people if they are <thing you don’t like> before you share a meal. I doubt you do. And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them? I believe this to be an apt comparison because abortion has killed orders of magnitude more humans than nazis ever did.

>> And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them?

Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.

You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?

This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"

(https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...)

One needs to ask why Grok continues to have these nazi outbursts while other modern chatbots don't.

Abortions kill _people_? Hundreds of millions of people?

You didn't need to make an account for this.

It’s not a question of who benefits from it. It’s that the place got weird and creepy and the algorithm is maximizing for engagement of an unpleasant type. I quit last July because I couldn’t stand the angry know-nothing blue checks being promoted into my replies and the cryptocurrency scams.

> Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.

Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.

That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.

> I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute

I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.

I watched the video with surrounding context and it looked like a Nazi salute. Did he ever deny it was a Nazi salute?

It's not just the salute, either, which was pretty clearly a Nazi salute that he did twice. It was support for the white Afrikaaners and the AfD in Germany and ripping the aid away from children in Africa, killing them, and on and on.

yes

Bluesky is not better (see for instance [0]). I think no one has cracked how to properly run a microblogging website.

[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...

Blue Sky has a lot of left leaning folks, but the ownership isn't putting their thumb on the scales for that; it occurred naturally.

And I find that there are some thoughtful conservatives who do ok there. I follow some of them.

I joined it about 6 months ago and absolutely love the ~uncensored free for all nature of it!

And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.

See, example of a guy thay calls X uncensored despite it literally doing that. Just not to fascists.

Censoring people who disagree with you is not the same as no censorship.

> ~uncensored

The term "cis" will still get you a warning while my for-you page has been consistently filling up with more and more far right content. I regularly see blue checks espousing actual jewish-conspiracy antisemitism.

Every time something happens to anyone, blue check comments asking if any of the parties were black, sometimes not even asking just assuming and blaming it on black people.

Elon has truly created a cesspit Nazi bar of that site.

Which leaves me asking: why are you still there?

Some good tech content and the regular thrill of telling racists their mom regrets not getting that abortion.

Were they? My recollection is that in the tech space a lot of people were saying "it's just an app, why do they need so many people"

The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?

On the other side people were already asking why Twitter didn't do more moderation and better filtering (= more people).

And we expected that breaking rules would have serious repercussions, which was a foolish assumption as we've seen.

> The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?

I can speak for myself. I think Enron Musk is a despicable person, and at the same time I don't understand why a shitty app needs so many people.

It's an easy (but often wrong) transition from "I don't understand why" to "it must not be necessary".

"I don't understand why ..." is a polite way of saying "I have some experience on the matter and have come up the belief that ...". The actual conclusion may still be wrong, but I hope this helps with your reading of my comment.

Tech industry has been perpetually growing in the last decades. That means juniors are always a large share of the tech population, and as any demographic, some are bound to be clueless and still vocal. The issue is that in more stable industries, there would be a larger share of seniors to respond with more grounded takes. In ours, these voices are drowned, especially on relatively anonymous media such as HN.

> Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.

Is this where the bar is set now? Not tanking a $40B corporation within a year now passes off as success? Really?

You people are desperately grasping at straws.

Virtually nobody said that it would go under in a year because that makes no sense. It's financially possible for it to tread water for years whilst losing money.

I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.

Lol the overwhelming tech jerk opinion was that he was firing elite engineers and the site would be unmaintainable as a result, and that he had over-leveraged himself to the point of bankruptcy.

He can't go bankrupt in any sane length of time whilst having the dragon hoard he has. I think you are cherry picking a few folks and assigning them the roles of "the public".

He's probably at more risk of falling out a window Soviet style than poverty.

It probably is unmaintainable but it was already feature complete at time of purchase.

Seems like it is mostly bots and neo-Nazi adjacent folks

Ok, everything can be seen as a success if you set your expectations low enough...

I don’t think most people were betting that or if they were they weren’t thinking that hard about it. Musk can run a money loser as a hobby if he likes.