Key facts
- Musk wrote on X that Grok Bot's cost was unsustainably high relative to revenue.
- SpaceX launched Grok Bot in August with tiers from free to $200 a month.
- SpaceX said in its earnings last month that Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users.
- SpaceX plans to fold Grok Bot into a new $8-a-month X subscription with X premium and Cursor.
- Musk said in October that Grok Bot would also use models including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney and Suno.
Elon Musk wrote on X on Sunday that the cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue, after users complained their weekly allowances were running out faster than usual. The SpaceX CEO said in another reply that reducing allowances and telling users was just being sensible.
SpaceX launched Grok Bot, an AI agent that uses a virtual computer to perform tasks such as shopping, in August. It is sold in tiers from free to $200 a month, each with usage limits that refresh weekly, a practice the report says SpaceX and other AI agent makers use to prevent users from running up large AI bills.
SpaceX said in its earnings last month that Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users. Musk told investors the agent had the fastest growth of a product he had ever seen and said it may end up using most of the company's Super Intelligence compute.
SpaceX recently announced it would fold Grok Bot into a new $8-a-month X subscription that also includes X premium and Cursor, the AI coding platform it acquired earlier this year. In October, Musk said the agent would also use AI models other than Grok, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney and Suno.
The report said Meta has not disclosed how much its Muse agent costs to run, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors last month that it is very compute-intensive and not yet profitable. Musk's comments drew mockery from some X users, who cited his recent remarks that saving money is pointless because an age of AI abundance is approaching.