Musk Says Grok Bot’s Costs Were ‘Unsustainably High’ Weeks After Touting Rapid Growth

Topline

Elon Musk acknowledged on Sunday that the cost of running SpaceX’s AI agent Grok Bot was “unsustainably high” relative to the revenue it generated, while responding to subscriber complaints about usage limits less than two weeks after the billionaire touted the service as the fastest-growing product he had ever seen.

Key Facts

In response to a post on X about people’s Grok bot usage limits running out “really fast” this week, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”

In a separate exchange on X with a user complaining about waiting a few days for their usage limit to reset, Musk asked whether the cost of upgrading to a higher-usage subscription tier was too high.

The billionaire’s posts didn’t say how much Grok Bot costs the company to operate or if the company has lowered its usage limits for subscribers.

Grok Bot is an AI agent similar to Meta’s Muse and a separate product from the company’s chatbot Grok; it is available to users signed up for the company’s $30 per month “Premium” tier or higher.

Individual subscribers can also sign up for the $100 per month Super and $200 per month Ultra plans, which offer significantly higher usage limits than the “Premium” tier, but it’s unclear if the affected users were on the $30 plan.

What Has Musk Previously Said About Grok Bot?

During SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call two weeks ago, Musk hailed Grok Bot as the fastest-growing product he has ever seen, and said, “I’ve never seen anything grow this fast.” Musk also said the company is seeing Grok Bot usage grow over time per user, adding: “As we make Grok Bot more useful, we’re seeing users use it more per week, not use it less.” The billionaire said his company will deploy “Grok Bot at scale for enterprise customers,” is already in talks with some “trusted customers,” and is preparing for “wide deployment within a few weeks.” Musk also predicted that Grok Bot may end up being the product that “uses most of our SI compute.”

big number

800,000. That’s how many paid weekly users Grok Bot had in early October, according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. In the company’s earnings call, she said this number had more than doubled over the previous month, and added that companies were using Grok Bot as a “force multiplier across sales, marketing, IT, and engineering, treating it as an always-on teammate for complex end-to-end workflows.”

tangent

Several users also complained on Cursor’s community forum about unexpected spikes in their recorded Grok Bot usage without any actual increase in activity. SpaceX acquired the AI coding platform for $60 billion in August, and its subscription tiers now mirror xAI’s subscription prices. Cursor reported a billing and usage dashboard problem on Sunday, which was later marked as resolved, but it’s unclear if this is what was causing the spike in Grok Bot usage readings. According to xAI’s official subscription documentation, Grok and Cursor draw from a shared weekly usage allowance under the company’s unified subscription plans.