The only people who think Grok is anything other than Musk’s puppet are not informed or ignoring the evidence. It’s clear he keeps tweaking it to puppet his views. Whenever Grok provides output in conflict with Musk, the response is "we'll fix it" versus "I defer to my supposedly state of the art frontier foundational model driven chatbot."
I don't think it's fair to just right off Grok as Musk's puppet, when there are millions of DAUs. Musk's inability to keep his hands off of fine-tuning the system prompt of Grok is concerning at the very least, but that dismisses the fact that there real people are indeed using Grok, and real people do indeed call upon it for truth-seeking. Just like real people used Google, CNN, NYTimes, ChatGPT.
fwiw: I think it's wrong that Grok responses are prepended with "What would Elon say". still doesn't change the truth that people are and will be continuing to use it
A captive audience does not create truth. Certainly, it demonstrates the ability to control the narrative in a sticky social network (the DAUs you mention), but it does not create truth in of itself. Real people consume brain rot at scale on TikTok, does that make that content truth? Some of the content may contain facts and truth, but anything that is not that is a shared delusion, opinions, and entertainment.
fwiw: I think it's wrong that Grok responses are prepended with "What would Elon say". still doesn't change the truth that people are and will be continuing to use it