Influential computer scientist Paul Graham on Tuesday wrote on X: “Something I told 14 yo: There’s a kind of politician who tells people ‘Your life is bad because <outgroup> stole what’s rightfully yours. Vote for me and I’ll get it back for you.’ They do it on both the left (Lenin) and right (Hitler), and they’re invariably bad news.”
X owner Elon Musk replied to Graham, writing: “Hitler was also left, just a different type of left. Hardcore socialist.”
Graham, who proposed a disagreement hierarchy in a 2008 essay How to Disagree, responded: “This weird new right-wing fantasy that Hitler was a leftist can be trivially refuted by asking how the German left felt about him. @Grok, how did the German left feel about Hitler?”
Grok, the resident X AI chatbot, answered: “The German left—Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD)—saw Hitler and the Nazis as their mortal enemies. They battled Nazi SA stormtroopers in bloody street fights throughout the Weimar years. After 1933, the regime banned both parties, arrested their leaders and members by the tens of thousands, and sent many to early concentration camps. The left did not view Hitler as one of their own.”
Something I told 14 yo: There’s a kind of politician who tells people “Your life is bad because <outgroup> stole what’s rightfully yours. Vote for me and I’ll get it back for you.” They do it on both the left (Lenin) and right (Hitler), and they’re invariably bad news.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) May 26, 2026
The Financial Times‘ chief U.S. commentator and columnist based in Washington, D.C., Edward Luce, who wrote speeches for Larry Summers when he was U.S. Treasury Secretary, replied to Musk: “You’re a very stupid man.”
classic example of billionaire who thinks his skill and luck in one area makes him a genius in all.
— Edward Luce (@EdwardGLuce) May 27, 2026
Peter Szekely, former Reuters correspondent and president of the NewsGuild of New York, replied to Luce: “@elonmusk is one of those people who begs the question: Devious or dim?” Luce replied to Szekely, writing: “classic example of billionaire who thinks his skill and luck in one area makes him a genius in all.”
[NOTE: When Grok was asked if Hitler was a “hardcore socialist”, it replied: “**No, Hitler was not a hardcore socialist in any conventional sense.** The Nazi Party’s full name included ‘National Socialist,’ and its 1920 25-point platform had some anti-capitalist rhetoric to appeal to workers (e.g., nationalizing trusts, profit-sharing). But Hitler redefined ‘socialism’ to mean national/racial solidarity and the ‘common weal,’ explicitly rejecting Marxism, class conflict, and communism as Jewish plots.”]