Elon musk

Wednesday

Toby Young

Grok is the Botticelli of our time

From our UK edition

Liz Kendall, the Technology Secretary, stood up in the Commons on Monday and thundered against Elon Musk, saying the government would take urgent measures to hold him to account. The reason for her broadside is that Grok, the AI chatbot owned by Musk and now integrated into X, has been misbehaving. In the past few weeks, it has granted users’ requests to create sexualised images of women and children, causing something close to meltdown among the Musk-hating chattering classes. In the Lords, scarcely a day passes without Labour’s favourite bogeyman being wheeled out to be pelted with verbal brickbats. But how exactly does Kendall propose to rein Musk in?

The Spectator

How many pubs are left in the UK?

From our UK edition

Net freedoms The government was pressed to ban X over charges that Elon Musk’s AI app Grok is being used to ‘undress’ women and children. Kemi Badenoch said the Tories would copy Australia in banning under-16s from social media. What are the most extreme countries for regulating the internet and social media – using a combined score including political sites, pornography and virtual private networks (VPNs), from the most laissez-faire at 1 to the most restrictive at 12?

Michael Gove

Why Nadhim Zahawi (and Reform) are making a mistake

From our UK edition

50 min listen

This week on Quite right!, Michael and Maddie examine Nadhim Zahawi’s dramatic defection to Reform UK and ask whether it strengthens the party’s insurgent credentials or exposes a deeper strategic mistake. Is Reform becoming a genuine outsider movement, or simply a refuge for disaffected Tories? And what does the pattern of Boris-era defections reveal about credibility, competence and the challenge of turning populist energy into a governing force? Then, Iran: mass protests against the regime have erupted onto the streets of Tehran and beyond. Are these demonstrations the prelude to real regime change – or another brutal crackdown waiting to happen? And what role should the West, and the United States in particular, play as the situation escalates?

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

Hegseth’s vision is more Starship Troopers than Starfleet Academy

​“Welcome to Starbase, Texas,” Elon Musk said from the stage Monday night, as the crowd whooped. “This is a city. It’s actually legally a city that thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing. And it’s now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. For people out there who are curious to see it, we’re actually on a public highway, so you can come and visit. Drive down the road and see the epic hardware. I think this is the first time that a rocket development program has actually been on a public highway.

Friday

Tom Slater

Britain’s X crackdown is no joke

The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say Labour’s ire for X isn’t simply about the site’s supposedly insufficient safeguarding policies Britain’s Labour party has issued its most serious threat yet to social-media giant X – whose owner, Elon Musk, has become this rudderless government’s go-to bogeyman.

Tuesday

Kelly Chapman

The sinister side of Grok

The X-native AI Grok exploded in popularity this weekend – as users discovered that its media tab was filled with requests to generate disrobed and scantily clad versions of images of women and children that people had posted publicly. "Put her in a bikini," users asked the AI. Grok complied with these requests freely, with no meaningful oversight or guardrails in place, automatically generating images corresponding to every prurient prompt. The ensuing discourse quickly polarized. On one side were tech nihilists, arguing that this use of AI was inevitable and therefore unsurprising. After all, anyone can already download publicly posted images and manipulate them privately.

grok

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

America’s free-speech war on the EU

If I were a bookie, I would be making odds now about when the European Union will finally unravel and die. Unless there is an imminent and drastic course correction, the blessed event cannot be far off.  I might need a Doomsday Clock akin to the one publicized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their clock hovers near midnight, which signifies nuclear Armageddon, the minute hand pushed closer or farther away from the blast depending on minatory world events. My clock would measure the EU’s proximity to implosion. Its recent decision to fine Elon Musk and his company X €120 million for “non-compliance with transparency obligations” has me nudging the minute hand closer to midnight. “Non-compliance with transparency obligations.” What do you reckon that means?

Thursday

Avi Loeb

The scientific case for the existence of intelligent alien life

The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained on. For decades, the data set that established comet expertise largely comprised icy rocks in the solar system. My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same. This possibility must be added to the training data set of comet experts when studying interstellar objects.

Wednesday

Terry Barnes

Will tech companies bend to Australia’s social media ban?

It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good uses, but it also has its bad ones. Staying in control of your social media life is difficult enough as an adult, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell. Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken their own lives as a result of what has befallen them online.

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare

“Some people will correct me. They love to correct me. Even though I’m right about everything,” President Trump was saying, but no one was about to correct the President at this December cabinet meeting, the last in a series of extremely long such affairs that TV has carried this year. At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era. Trump is always with us, and talking at us. Before the roundtable of cabinet members listing their accomplishments and kissing the boss’s butt, Trump talked for nearly 30 minutes.

Trump cabinet

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

DoGE has had its day

DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib.  It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

doge
X
Stephen Daisley

The global cottage industry gaming America’s culture wars

It is the 9/11 of the blue ticks, the Hindenburg of the grifters, the dotcom bubble of the slop-peddlers. The influencer industry has been left reeling by a new function on X which allows readers to see the location from which any given account is operating. The latest update makes it possible to establish when and where an X account was set up and whether it has changed its name since then. A sensible measure, you might think, but not if X is where you make your living and do so by inserting yourself into other countries’ internal politics. There are no firm figures on how many earn a crust this way but even the most cursory glance through the Hellsite Formerly Known as Twitter will tell you the number isn’t insignificant.

Tuesday

James Ball

The new power players running the world

From our UK edition

At the opening of The Hour of the Predator, Giuliano da Empoli describes Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire, its doomed ruler Moctezuma II’s response (ineffective vacillation, delaying any course of action), its consequences and its relevance to politics today. It is a striking introduction to a brief, bracing and profoundly alarming book. The author argues that an alliance of tech bros and authoritarian rulers – whom he calls modern-day Borgias – are sweeping away the rules-based international order. He sees our elected leaders as comparable to the procrastinating Aztec emperor, appeasing and hesitating as the opportunity for action passes into history. Da Empoli has a peculiar vantage point.

tech
Matt Ridley

Among the lords of tech

“What’s missing?” the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at Los Angeles, laid out in the haze below us. “Cranes!” he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital “bits” instead of physical “atoms” because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

This time it’s crypto: now the Bank of England bows to Trump

From our UK edition

The softening of the Bank of England’s stance on ‘stablecoins’ looks like another tugging of the British forelock towards the Trump regime. Stablecoins are virtual money akin to cryptocurrency, but theoretically safer because their value is pegged to the dollar or other conventional currencies. Often used by investors to buy into crypto, they’re claimed to offer a more efficient future for international payments – but also accused of facilitating crime. Two years ago, Governor Andrew Bailey decreed that stablecoins did not ‘meet the standards we expect of safe money’; other non-US regulators largely agreed. That well-known crypto player Donald Trump, however, called them ‘perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the internet’.

Matt Ridley

America thinks Britain is finished

‘What’s missing?’ the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at the city of Los Angeles laid out in the haze below us. ‘Cranes!’ he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital ‘bits’ instead of physical ‘atoms’, because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Elon *does* have friends… in high places

Where are you going, Elon? Where have you been? The 87-year-old novelist Joyce Carol Oates unleashed her X account to excoriate the app’s owner Elon Musk this weekend. “So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died... In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’” OK, Joyce.

Elon Musk

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter.

bill gates

Saturday

Brandon Goldman

Why you need Big Balls

Big nicknames come with big responsibilities. And the owner of one of the mightiest monikers – Big Balls – feels the weight of his own obligations keenly. In a rare interview, Edward Coristine spoke about how his family fled to America from Russia after his grandfather was executed for spying for the US. Valery Martynov was a KGB officer who was recruited by the FBI in the early 1980s. He passed Soviet secrets to his American handlers until he was exposed by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, two of the most notorious traitors in US history.  Recalled to Moscow under false pretenses, Martynov was arrested and executed in 1987. His widow and children eventually sought refuge in America.

Big Balls

Thursday

Neal Pollack

The Facebook police come calling

In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it. “You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”They did not. “I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

Free speech