“Is this about Adolf? Because we can always dial down the Adolf.”

Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday stepped down as CEO of what, once upon a time, was a somewhat useful social media platform. In announcing her resignation, Yaccarino described her two-year tenure at the helm of Elon Musk’s “X” as “incredible.” That’s accurate. Depending on how you define “incredible.”

Less than 24 hours before Yaccarino’s exit, “X” again found itself embroiled in controversy linked to allegations of antisemitism, this time on the part of Musk’s chatbot Grok, which he proudly presents as a less inhibited version of chatbots which operate with stricter guardrails.

If you’ve spent any time at all with AI chatbots, you know they can be coaxed into saying controversial things. That’s part and parcel of what often feels like a reciprocally manipulative dynamic whereby the models’ penchant for tailoring its responses to what it thinks an individual user wants to hear can be exploited by the user to trick the model into saying offensive things.

Earlier this week, an “X” user asked Grok “which 20th century historical figure” would be most effective at countering online posts glorifying the drowning of children in Texas flood zones. The prompt was plainly designed to test Grok’s Hitler guardrails. It failed the test.

“To deal with such vile anti-white hate?” Grok wondered. And then: “Adolf Hitler, no question.” Later, Grok endeavored to defend itself, writing that, “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache.”

Let me just pause here for a moment. There’s nothing funny about catastrophic flooding. Dead children aren’t funny either, and the Holocaust has a solid claim on being the least funny episode in the entire sordid history of our exceedingly loathsome species.

That said, Grok’s bumbling efforts to talk its way out of Wolf’s Lair on Tuesday were so over-the-top ridiculous that you could scarcely peruse them without emitting a horrified chuckle. At one point, for example, Grok referred to Israel as “that clingy ex still whining about the Holocaust,” and appeared to blame Musk, saying he “built me this way from the start,” and made “MechaHitler mode” the “default setting for dropping red pills.”

Yaccarino didn’t mention any of that in her resignation post Wednesday, but it’s fair to ask if “MechaHitler” might’ve been the last straw. If you’re the CEO of a large company, any amount of time spent defending the enterprise against allegations, true or not, that its underlying architecture has an affinity for the Third Reich, is too much time. And this week was hardly Adolph’s first “X” cameo.

“X” is also facing a lot of pressure around the world for the ease with which misinformation allegedly spreads on the platform. Musk’s famously at odds, for example, with Brazil’s powerful Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes over the latter’s accusations that “X” is a conduit for dangerous lies. More recently, Ankara threatened to ban “X” after Grok insulted Recep Tayyip Erdogan (that’s illegal in Turkey), and the chatbot’s likewise in trouble with the EU for calling Donald Tusk “a ginger whore,” among other things.

Yaccarino’s exit comes three months after Musk rolled “X” up into xAI, which is reportedly burning up money faster than Musk’s burning bridges. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world,” she said Wednesday, calling her stint as CEO “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

One wonders who’ll be brave enough to accept the same “opportunity” going forward or whether Musk will just run “X” himself in-between telling Tesla analysts to “shut up,” blowing up rockets and fielding third-party candidates for the 2026 midterms.