Grok Bot Reached 800,000 Paid Weekly Users as Musk Cited High Costs

Grok Bot reached 800,000 paid weekly users earlier in October, double September's count, as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned that its serving costs were unsustainable relative to revenue.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell gave the figure on the company's Oct. 20 third-quarter earnings call. Businesses were the fastest-growing user group, she said, using Grok Bot for IT, sales, marketing and engineering. Musk said customers were using Grok more as its capabilities improved.

In a Nov. 1 post on X, Musk responded to a user whose usage allowance had run out four days early. “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,” he wrote. TokenPost previously covered Musk's warning about Grok Bot's serving costs.

Launched in August, Grok Bot can perform tasks that take several steps, including browsing websites, drafting emails and processing invoices. Those workflows can require more computing power than a single chatbot response.

SpaceX's Super Intelligence division reported $7.56 billion in third-quarter revenue, up from $813 million a year earlier, and $431 million in operating profit, compared with a $1.7 billion loss. SpaceX spent $16.4 billion on AI capital expenditures, 84% of its $19.6 billion in total capital expenditures for the quarter. Leasing data center capacity to Anthropic and Google contributed much of the division's revenue growth.

Musk told analysts SpaceX aims to split computing capacity roughly evenly between its own AI products and rentals to other companies. He said Grok Bot may eventually use most of the division's computing capacity. Musk also described strong demand from hyperscalers and smaller companies, saying SpaceX was renewing contracts at higher dollars per watt and that a six-month payback period for computing capacity next year was possible.