In a world where TikTok reigns as the mad king of entertainment, Elon Musk could revive Vine – the network with the AI product Grok Imagine, which invented hot water a decade ago, then drowned in it.
Before the end of the last decade, the social media market seemed to have become as boring as a Monday morning business conference. All the important chairs had already been secured by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, while video lovers were wasting long hours on YouTube. How difficult it is to penetrate this digital club of the rich, even the great Google experienced firsthand how difficult it is, when in 2019 the failed Google+ platform crashed (yes, that thing you used involuntarily for a day because Google demanded it of you). Now comes Vine disguised as Grok Imagine.
Grok Imagine is AI Vine!
Btw, we recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 2, 2025
But what Google and others failed to do, has literally exploded in the hands of the Chinese company ByteDance. Its TikTok has become the king of short-form video content in recent years and the favorite digital obsession of Generation Z (and their parents, who say they were just “checking what their kids were watching”).
Short videos that were "cool" before TikTok was "cool"
But long before TikTok, in 2012, Vine, which was essentially Instagram, launched, except instead of photos, users could share their meals or sunsets, but short 6-second video bursts of genius or absurdity. In those good old days after Facebook's big $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, Twitter quickly sniffed out an opportunity and bought Vine the same year.
Despite an initial explosion of popularity among younger users, Vine died a slow digital death in 2017. The culprits? From poor management (or as Musk would say – “totally incompetent management”), the inability to monetize users’ creativity, to the migration of creators to more promising pastures.
Grok Imagine – artificial intelligence or Musk's digital nostalgia?
But Vine is now rising from the grave like a Frankenstein of algorithms and Musk's imagination. Elon Musk, the alpha and omega of Company X (formerly known as Twitter), has unveiled a new feature for his AI chatbot Grok — called Grok Imagine, which sounds like something that would come straight out of the head of Douglas Adams.
With Grok Imagine, users will create short videos with just a simple text description. You write down what you want to see – say, “a puppy on a skateboard, wearing a hat, singing the Macarena” – and Grok Imagine creates exactly that video. Not bad, right? The idea is not revolutionary, as similar solutions already exist (Musk would defend that his ideas are not copies, but “practical improvements”), but it is certainly attractive enough that many people will be willing to pay for it.
Currently, Grok Imagine is only available in beta for select users, but it will soon become available to subscribers of the premium SuperGrok service for a modest $30 per month - which is about the cost of one avocado toast at an elite bar in San Francisco.
Imagine with @Grok pic.twitter.com/UIay5yNp97
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2025
Vine zombies – the return of old footage?
In true Musk fashion, there's something mysterious about the game. Musk recently announced that an archive of all the old Vine videos he thought were long lost (or rather, "stolen" by Twitter) had been found. It's supposedly available for all users to re-post their youthful antics to the world.
The question is, what does this mean in concrete terms? Will old accounts be accessible again, or will Musk simply offer users the opportunity to pull digital skeletons out of the archive and reshare them as viral memories? Right now, this is as mysterious as Musk's rocket launch schedule, so we'll have to wait and see for clear answers.
It's safe to say that Musk - the king of digital noise, space adventure and AI acrobatics - is once again trying to become the center of the digital universe with his new Vine or Grok (or whatever he'll call it next week). Whether he succeeds, or we'll just get another entertaining anecdote for future generations, only time will tell.
