Grok Bot is growing fast—but Elon Musk says its costs are ‘unsustainably high’ compared to revenue

Elon Musk's AI bot, Grok, is experiencing rapid growth, with CEO Musk describing it as the fastest-growing product he's ever seen. However, this growth comes with a high cost, as Musk revealed on X that serving Grok Bot is "unsustainably high relative to revenue." Grok Bot, an AI agent developed by SpaceX and launched in August, can perform multi-step tasks like browsing websites, drafting emails, and processing invoices.

It has reached 800,000 paid weekly users, which is double the number of users from the previous month. Companies are the fastest-growing category using Grok, employing it for IT, sales, marketing, and engineering. Musk noted that users are utilizing the bot more as its capabilities improve, with users using it more per week. This increased usage could drive up SpaceX's costs without necessarily resulting in more revenue.

Similar cost issues are faced by Meta, with its Muse AI agent attracting 10 million users since its launch in September, but also proving costly to run. SpaceX's Super Intelligence division reported $7.56 billion in Q3 revenue and $431 million in operating profit, but it's spending $16.4 billion on AI capex, which is more than double the division's quarterly revenue and accounts for 84% of SpaceX's total $19.6 billion in Q3 capex.

SpaceX aims to split compute power 50-50 between its own AI products and renting it to other companies, but the demand for Grok may change this strategy.