Grok's Iran verification failures did not occur in a vacuum — they occurred inside a trust relationship that Elon Musk built explicitly. The sequence matters: Musk promoted Grok as a fact-checking tool for war footage, then Grok spread demonstrably false Iran content, and the audience that encountered that false content had been pre-authorized to trust it by the platform owner. [14] This is not a story about an AI tool that performed below expectations. It is a story about how institutional endorsement transforms a tool's errors into something closer to…