I’ve written before about why you should never take a dependency on Elon Musk for anything, but the introduction of an API for Grok AI compels me to further belabor this point.
APIs are a sacred covenant between platforms and developers, and should be neither casually offered nor casually embraced. Relying on an API is a high-trust decision in our increasingly low-trust world.
It should be obvious, but there are some things to consider before embracing an Elon API:
- Elon turned off the Twitter API and Twitter SSO with no notice whatsoever, and didn’t get around to acknowledging it for days (and never sufficiently). Fool me once, etc, etc.
- Elon is erratic. Whether due to drug use or not, pretty much any 24 hour window on Twitter makes this point, along with his autistic foray into “public service”.
- Elon is petty, vindictive, enthusiastically wields the legal system to harass his (many) enemies, and shamelessly hampers competitors or companies he just doesn’t like.
- Elon regularly falls out with friends, allies and partners.
- Elon has a long history of exaggerating capabilities and congenitally optimistic schedules. He’s the vaporware GOAT with his self-driving car promises. Promises to cut $2 trillion from the Federal budget likely cements his vaporware GOAT status for eternity.
- Elon has many distractions that could undermine even his best intentions to serve a particular set of customers. Some, like Tesla, are under immense stress. He also has a history of self-dealing across his portfolio of companies, and not for the benefit of customers or investors.
- Elon doesn’t believe in taking dependencies himself, and aggressively practices vertical integration across his businesses (this has become a speaking point in his battle with Peter “Retardo/Ron Vara/Rasputin” Navarro).
- Elon uses his political connections to coerce customers and is advancing a new legal theory by suing advertisers for not buying Twitter ads. Evidently we are all required to do business with Elon, no matter how much he sabotages his companies.
- Elon personally decides, in real-time, where Ukraine can and cannot use StarLink in its war with Russia. He has regular one-on-ones with Putin (hello Logan Act!), and after incongruously switching sides in that war, the Trump Administration threatened to end Ukraine’s use of StarLink. Elon currently seeks to reassure the world he would never do that, as he loses StarLink business because of concerns about his reliability, but does not deny he could. (For the record, StarLink is awesome, and I say that as someone whose Twitter status has long since been down-ranked).
- And we won’t even speculate here on how compromised Elon is by the Chinese Communist Party (though others have).
Platforms require great trust and anyone considering an Elon API should explicitly think about whether he is a reliable provider (polls suggest he faces an uphill battle).
Offering an API and inviting people to take a dependency on it is a long term commitment. Think decades by default. And you better think it through – economically and technically — before introduction. Don’t assume you will revise the terms of trade if it has some success. Should you have to deprecate the API, there better be a great rationale with at least a year of notice and help for customers to migrate.
Do we think Elon is up to the task?
