Key Takeaways
- SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Nov. 1 that the cost of serving Grok Bot was “unsustainably high relative to revenue.” He said it days after Grok Bot grew to over 600,000 daily users.
- Grok Bot’s subscribers aren’t paying for the compute they use, and SpaceX can rent the same GPUs to customers like Anthropic for far more.
- If every Grok Bot daily user paid for the top $200-a-month plan, the app would bring in only a little more in a year than Anthropic pays SpaceX in one month.
- Analysts expect SpaceX’s revenue to reach $180 billion in 2027, and the compute rental business is already the company’s biggest piece.
Elon Musk spent last week cheering on Grok Bot. Now SpaceX (SPCX) is rationing it.
On Sunday, an X user asked Musk for a “Grok Bot reset,” since “lots of people say their usage ran out really fast this week.”
Musk’s answer was blunt: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
That’s quite a turn from Thursday. That day, Musk replied to a post celebrating Grok Bot’s jump from under 100,000 daily users in early September to over 600,000 by Oct. 26 by pointing out that it “has no free tier.”
So every Grok Bot user pays, and serving them still cost SpaceX more than they brought in.
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Anthropic pays better
SpaceX doesn’t have to spend its GPUs on Grok Bot. It can rent them out, and it does.
SpaceX’s prospectus says Anthropic’s contract pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month.
Grok Bot brings in much less. Since Oct. 12, new users get it through The X Subscription, at $30, $100 or $200 a month. Say all 600,000 daily users paid the top $200. That’s $120 million a month, or $1.44 billion a year (and the subscription pays for more than Grok Bot).
That’s barely more than Anthropic pays in a single month.
Milk Road’s Kyle Reidhead set out the choice in a post on X: SpaceX can “lease 1GW/$50B+ or they can route it to Grok/GrokBot and generate $100B+/year like the frontier models are experiencing.” Musk replied “Interesting” on the same day he made his Grok Bot admission.
Grok Bot is a long way from $100 billion a year. Management has said it wants to split SpaceX’s compute roughly 50-50 between its own products and rentals, with room to tilt 60-40 either way. I’d guess the rentals are winning that tug-of-war right now.
Analysts expect SpaceX’s revenue to more than triple next year, then nearly double again in 2028:
The compute business already brings in more than half of that revenue. The Super Intelligence segment, home to Grok and the rentals, made $7.56 billion of SpaceX’s $14.6 billion third-quarter revenue. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is the customer behind 34.5% of the total. Grok Bot’s caps shouldn’t move those estimates at all.
SpaceX is buying GPUs as fast as it can
Replit CEO Amjad Masad had a different explanation. An X user had argued that Grok Bot was paying Anthropic to use its models. In his reply, Masad noted that Anthropic pays SpaceX for compute, so SpaceX has margin to burn. “I think the bigger issue is compute shortage,” he wrote.
OpenAI is tightening too. It said ChatGPT and Codex will share one usage limit on its Plus, Pro and Business plans starting Dec. 31.
SpaceX is spending heavily to get more compute. Its capex climbed from $4.4 billion in 2023 to $20.9 billion in 2025:
Then it spent $48.1 billion in the first nine months of 2026 alone, and it expects to spend another $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter. Musk says there will be “around 1.2M Blackwells” at Colossus 2, its Memphis data center, by the end of the year.
Masad is right about the margin, too. SpaceX’s gross margin has climbed every year since 2023:
Over the last twelve months, it’s even higher, at 56.7%.
So SpaceX can afford to lose money on Grok Bot for a while. But every GPU that serves a heavy user is a GPU it could have rented out.
Some of this is simple pricing, too. Grok Bot has no free tier, so SpaceX had two ways to handle users who cost more than they pay: tighter caps or higher prices. It picked caps.
Grok Bot waits its turn
Musk’s switcheroo makes sense to me. As a shareholder, I’d want him making exactly this trade: rent the GPUs for billions a month, and make Grok Bot’s power users wait.
The rent isn’t locked in, though. Anthropic’s IPO filing says either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice once the first noncancelable periods end in January and March 2027.
Of course, the caps may not last. The X account XFreeze summed up Musk’s update on the site: two more Colossus 2 buildings are due by year-end, and one of them is set up for inference and targeted for December. Where that capacity goes, Grok Bot or the next tenant, will tell us which business Musk is betting on.
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