According to Business Insider, in a February 2025 interview on the “Moonshots” podcast with Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk revealed he recently underwent an MRI and then uploaded the results to his AI chatbot, Grok, for analysis. Musk said neither his doctors nor Grok found any issues, though his reason for the scan is unclear. During the conversation, which touched on AI’s role in extending human lifespan, Musk referenced a 2024 claim by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that AI could double life expectancy by 2030. Musk also promoted the practice last week, quote-tweeting a story where a Norwegian Reddit user claimed Grok saved his life by urging a return to the hospital, leading to a discovery that his appendix was near rupture. Musk’s pitch is simple: “Try it!”
Musk the Patient and the Pitchman
So here’s the thing. This isn’t just a quirky anecdote. It’s a direct product endorsement from the CEO, using his own health data. Musk is basically acting as the lead beta tester and chief evangelist for Grok’s diagnostic potential. He’s weaving together a personal story with a third-party (and unverified) “miracle save” from a Reddit post. That’s powerful marketing. But it’s also incredibly risky. He’s encouraging people to use an AI, which his own company admits can be unreliable, as a second opinion on potentially life-altering medical information. What happens if Grok gets it wrong? The liability and ethical questions are a minefield.
The Longevity Context
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. The whole conversation with Diamandis—a Harvard-educated doctor and longevity entrepreneur—was framed around AI and living longer. Diamandis even pitched Musk on Fountain Life, a company he co-founded that offers “AI-guided diagnostics” and aims to create a “200 gigabyte upload” of a person’s health data. Look, the Silicon Valley dream of cheating death is a whole vibe right now, with billions flowing into anti-aging research. Musk himself called longevity an “extremely solvable problem.” So using Grok for health checks fits perfectly into that narrative. It’s not just a chatbot; it’s positioned as a tool in the high-stakes quest for immortality, or at least a much longer, healthier life. The ultimate value prop? As Fountain Life’s William Kapp put it, the goal is to “don’t die of anything stupid.”
A Really, *Really* Bad Idea?
Let’s be blunt. For the average person, this seems like a terrible idea. I’m not a doctor, but common sense screams that an AI model trained on internet data—prone to “confabulation” or just making stuff up—should not be your medical consultant. Even if Grok had access to a specialized medical dataset (which xAI hasn’t claimed), it’s not a regulated medical device. It has no accountability. The story about the appendix is dramatic, but it’s also anecdotal. For every one of those, how many false alarms or, worse, missed critical findings could there be? It shifts responsibility from licensed professionals to a black-box algorithm. That’s a dangerous precedent, no matter how cool it sounds on a podcast.
The Real Strategy Behind the Stunt
So what’s Musk really doing here? First, he’s trying to demonstrate Grok’s utility beyond answering questions about memes. He’s pushing it into a high-value, emotionally charged domain: your health. Second, he’s data harvesting. If people start uploading MRIs and blood tests, that’s an incredible, proprietary dataset to train future, more capable medical AI models. Third, it aligns xAI with the lucrative longevity industry. This isn’t just about chat. It’s about positioning Grok and xAI as central to the future of bio-digital convergence. It’s a classic Musk move: make a bold, controversial claim, generate endless discussion, and pull your product into the center of the biggest conversations of the day. Whether it’s medically sound is almost beside the point.
