Elon Musk says 'I am a...' as Grok goes viral for picking him over athletes, artists and supermodels

Elon Musk

Since the rollout of Grok 4.1, users have been sharing screenshots that show the chatbot massively overestimating Elon Musk’s abilities. According to a report by Tech Crunch, when asked whether it would pick Peyton Manning, Ryan Leaf or Musk in the 1998 NFL draft, Grok said it would choose Musk without hesitation. The model claimed Musk would “engineer wins” the way he builds rockets and EVs.

From runways to fine art, Grok keeps picking Musk

As per the report, the pattern continued when people asked Grok who should walk a fashion runway: Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks or Musk. Once again, Grok chose Musk, insisting he would “redefine the show.” It even said it would prefer a painting by Musk over Monet or van Gogh. Many of these replies were later deleted, though users archived them.

Musk responded on X, saying Grok had been manipulated by adversarial prompts into making absurdly flattering statements. "Earlier today, Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me. For the record, I am a fat retard," said Musk in a post on X.

Still, the replies have fuelled debate because the praise seems targeted only at Musk rather than universally sycophantic behaviour typical of some LLMs.
 A deeper look at how Grok forms opinions
The report mentions that Grok’s public system prompt does not explicitly instruct the model to praise Musk. However, it does note that Grok sometimes cites “its creators’ public remarks” when asked for opinions, a behaviour X says is unintended. Earlier versions of Grok were also found to rely on Musk’s posts when answering political questions, as per the report.

Interestingly, Grok does have limits. It admitted that Simone Biles would outperform Musk in gymnastics, Beyoncé would out sing him and Noah Lyles would beat him in a race.

Still choosing Musk even against elite athletes

Yet when asked who should pitch for a baseball team between Tarik Skubal, Zack Wheeler, Paul Skenes and Musk, Grok again went with Musk. It argued he would “engineer a pitching machine that defies physics,” reinforcing the sense that Grok 4.1 still struggles with Musk focused bias despite promised fixes, according to the report.