Musk and "the world's most powerful AI": why the billionaire is putting Grok at the center of his business

Late on Wednesday night, July 9, famed technopreneur Ilon Musk presented Grok 4, not very modestly (which is pretty typical for Musk) called "the most powerful AI in the world." This could be considered just another stage of the endless AI race, in which all the leading technology companies are now taking a very active part. However, a number of related events suggest that for Ilon and his entire business empire, Grok is much more than just another AI model.

It's always interesting to try and understand what goes on in a billionaire's head, especially if it's someone as extravagant, to put it mildly, as Ilon Musk. The magazine of the American left Jacobin in 2022 undertook an attempt to analyze what influence the 1966 novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by American sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein had on him, and concluded that it was quite significant.

However, in my opinion, in light of the flurry of July events, it is much more interesting to turn to another work by the same author - the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land," published in 1961.

In the novel, it all begins when a Martian (yep, Musk's favorite Mars has already appeared!) named Michael Valentine Smith arrives on Earth. In fact, this is a man who miraculously survived the child of the members of the first Martian expedition, but raised by Martians. A kind of space Mowgli. And gradually it turns out that thanks to his alien upbringing he has very, very unusual abilities. In particular, he can "grok".

"To rumble means to 'fully identify.'" Our expression "it hurts me more than it hurts you" has a very definite Martian flavor. Martians seem to know instinctively the truth that - with great difficulty and not immediately - modern physics has taught us: in the process of observation, the observer interacts with the observed. To rumble  is to understand so completely that the observer becomes part of the observed, merges, blends, loses his individuality in the shared experience. This word stands for almost everything we know as religion, philosophy, and science," explained one of the characters in the book, semantics expert Dr. Mahmood.

That the Grok AI was named so for a reason was recently confirmed by Musk himself, who announced after a vote on the X network that the new Grok 4-based AI companion will be named "Valentine" after the character from Heinlein's novel. Will Grok be able to "grok" humanity?

"An app for nothing."

Well, if not all of humanity at once, then the users of the X network for sure. Buying X (then Twitter) in 2022, Musk promised to turn the social network into an "app for everything" - a kind of superapp that would combine social networking, entertainment, finance, dating and much more. 

Since then, however, the plans seem to have changed significantly. Instead, the social network has become an "app for nothing," a mere   "data mining quarry" for the billionaire's new favorite toy, the Grok AI, ironically Axios. Grok is literally everywhere on the X network - all you have to do is tag this "genie" to have it immediately appear to comment on your post. In March 2025, this became even more apparent after X became just a division of xAI, just the part of Musk's empire that develops artificial intelligence.

The final point of any independence of X was put in July, when it became known that the social network is leaving its CEO Linda Iaccarino. Her original job was to win back advertisers and make the social network profitable, but the "data mining career" apparently doesn't need profitability. It has a different function - helping AI grok the people who voluntarily write hundreds of millions of posts a day there. What has come out of this symbiosis?

During the Grok 4 presentation, Musk declared it not only "the most powerful AI in the world." 

"Academically, Grok 4 exceeds the level of a Ph.D. (PhD in the more familiar classification - ed.) in all subjects. No exceptions," Musk said. 

As proof, the results of various tests have been presented in summary form. xAI has not yet published the details of the tests for independent experts to analyze, but apparently no one will seriously question these data;

On a metric called Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) - a 2,500-question test created by nearly 1,000 experts in various fields of study - Grok 4's AI scored the highest of any other AI at 25.4 percent, wrote Scientific American, citing the company's own data. 

According to independent lab AI evaluation company Artificial Analysis, that result for Grok 4 is slightly lower at 23.9%, but it still leads, ahead of its closest competitors - Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (21.1%) and OpenAI's o3 (20%).

Musk predicted that Grok will discover new technologies next year, or maybe even this year. However, he said, "sometimes he may lack common sense and has yet to invent new technologies or discover new physics," writes Wired. 

All of this luxury is available to users through the Grok website or app for $30 per month. Access to an even more powerful version, known as the Grok 4 Heavy, will cost $300 monthly. According to the presentation, xAI plans to release additional models soon that are well-suited for programming and video creation tasks, the magazine said.

However, the "complete merger" with the X audience did not go unnoticed by the Grok AI - in July, it wrote openly anti-Semitic posts several times, and sometimes answered the question "what's your last name?" with "MechaHitler". In addition, it turned out that in some cases, the newest Grok 4, before answering a difficult question, the first thing it did was to search what Ilon Musk had said or written about it, thus translating not the wisdom of the superintelligence, but the position of his boss, CNBC writes;

However, xAI confirms that the problems have already been fixed. 

Despite these "rough edges", Musk seems to have a really powerful AI, quite capable of competing with OpenAI's GPT, which was previously considered the undisputed leader. And the billionaire has big plans for Grok.

Just a day after unveiling the Grok 4, Musk announced that his new superintelligence would be integrated into Tesla cars "very soon." In addition, he said Tesla shareholders would vote in favor of a potential investment in the xAi. In this way, Musk's only currently public company could become an "entry point" for retail investors looking to invest in his AI. 

Let's also not forget that Tesla, in addition to the cars themselves, is developing humanoid robots called Optimus. As recently as last year, Tesla's CEO said: "We should be seen as a company that develops robots using artificial intelligence, and those who see Tesla solely as a car company have the wrong perspective," Business Insider reminds us.

In July, Musk's company expanded the service area of its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, with the new card shaped suspiciously like a penis.   "Apparently solely to satisfy the juvenile humor of its CEO," considers portal Electrek.

How not to remember that one of the main characters of the book "Stranger in a Strange Land", Jubal Hershaw, considered not rational reason at all, but a powerful sexual instinct as one of the main engines of creativity. "When working on a book, I connect the seminal glands in parallel with the thalamus, and turn off the cerebral cortex," he said. Considering the fact that Network X officially allowed the posting of erotic content last year, it's scary to think what creative heights a Grok 4 trained on it might rise to.

With all this baggage, Musk's new AI will go not only to the streets of cities, but also into space. In mid-July, it became known that Musk's space company SpaceX invested $2 billion in xAI, and is recruiting a team of AI specialists.

And the cherry on the cake. While SpaceX has long been a big recipient of government contracts from the military, it was revealed on July 15 that already xAI has won a $200 million contract to develop AI for the Pentagon. "Separately, xAI announced a suite of its products called Grok for Government, making its advanced AI models, including its newest flagship model, Grok 4, available to federal, local, state and national security agencies," CNN writes.

So, what's the bottom line? It seems that Grok, the most powerful AI on the planet, is gradually becoming the centerpiece of Ilon Musk's entire business empire, including space and humanoid robots, as well as actively grokking the army and government agencies.

"'Grok' denotes both love and fear and hate - real hate. In the Martian structure of the world, it is impossible to hate something vague and indeterminate; before you can hate, you must grok the object of your hatred, understand it so completely that you merge with it and it with you. And only then can you hate, in fact, yourself. But from here it follows inevitably that you have both loved the object, praised it, and rejoiced that it is what it is. And hated it. I strongly suspect that next to Martian hatred, any earthly feeling, even the blackest and most sinister, is no more than a mild dislike," Dr. Mahmud said in Heinlein's book.

Oh, it seems for nothing that U.S. President Donald Trump had a major fight with Elon Musk in June.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor