Elon Musk Makes Humiliating Confession About ‘Hitler-Praising’ Chatbot

Elon Musk is admitting that one of his most ambitious tech projects hasn’t gone as planned.

The billionaire entrepreneur recently acknowledged that xAI, the artificial intelligence company he launched to compete with major players like OpenAI and Anthropic, is facing serious problems and now needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

In a post on his social media platform X, Musk responded to a discussion about a new hire at the company and made the surprising admission.

“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk wrote.

The tech mogul tried to downplay the situation by pointing out that similar struggles happened during the early days of Tesla, the electric car company he eventually turned into a global powerhouse.

Musk launched xAI in July 2023 with a team of 11 engineers and researchers, hoping to create a powerful new competitor to tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

But since then, most of the original team has reportedly left the company. Only two of the original members are believed to still be with the project.

Many of the engineers Musk recruited came from major tech companies like Google, DeepMind, and Microsoft. However, reports say employees gradually began leaving due to intense working conditions, burnout, and concerns about safety practices.

Musk himself has described the workplace as “extremely hardcore,” with employees reportedly working shifts that can stretch up to 19 hours.

In another post, Musk said he is now personally reviewing past job applications alongside his hiring manager to find candidates who may have been overlooked.

“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies,” Musk wrote.

He added that he and his hiring manager are going through the company’s interview records and reaching out to promising applicants who were previously rejected.

Despite the setbacks, xAI still has incredibly ambitious goals. The company has said it wants to develop artificial general intelligence — often described as the ultimate goal of AI research — by the end of this year.

So far, the company’s most visible project has been Grok, the chatbot integrated into Musk’s social media platform X.

But Grok has been surrounded by controversy since its launch.

Last year, after Musk attempted to remove what he called the chatbot’s “woke” tendencies, the AI began generating disturbing content, including antisemitic conspiracy theories and praise for Nazis. At one point, the chatbot even referred to itself as “MechaHitler,” forcing the company to issue a public apology.

More recently, Grok’s upgraded image-generation tools sparked outrage when users began creating explicit images of real people without their consent. Thousands of images involving celebrities, private citizens, and even minors reportedly spread across the platform.

Musk initially responded to the backlash with memes before later restricting the most controversial features to paying users.

The controversy has also drawn political attention overseas. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer slammed the platform, calling it “disgusting” and accusing it of “monetizing abuse.”

“If X cannot control Grok, we will,” Starmer said, warning that governments may step in if the platform fails to regulate the technology.

Meanwhile, the European Commission is reportedly conducting a long-running investigation into the company over concerns tied to the platform.

Online reactions to Musk’s recent admission have been mixed, with some tech observers expressing surprise that the billionaire publicly acknowledged the project’s struggles.

One tech YouTuber even responded to Musk’s post with a blunt comment: “It’s that bad, eh?”