Musk's xAI races to get Wall Street firms using Grok chatbot before SpaceX IPO

Musk's xAI races to get Wall Street firms to use Grok chatbot

Billionaire Elon Musk's xAI has recruited multiple Wall Street firms with ties to his business empire to test its Grok chatbot, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a push to bolster revenue ahead of parent company SpaceX's initial public offering. Apollo Global Management and Morgan Stanley have begun using Grok internally alongside software from other AI model makers, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. Valor Equity Partners is also using Grok, the people said. Despite some banks signing up for Grok, financiers are rarely using the chatbot for work, some of the people said. Musk's artificial intelligence venture is moving with urgency to boost revenue by selling chatbot subscriptions and access to its computing resources before SpaceX's expected IPO next month. Much of xAI's sales to date have come from deals with Musk's other ventures, including SpaceX and Tesla, and its tools are widely viewed as inferior to those of rivals OpenAI and Anthropic PBC for the finance industry. In the runup to its merger with SpaceX, xAI was burning through almost $1 billion per month.

xAI Pursues Finance Sector Growth Before SpaceX IPO | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company is looking to sell subscriptions to its chatbot and access to its computing resources, according to the report. xAI is pitching its Grok chatbot as a tool for gathering internal company information for performance reviews and for using data from Musk's social media platform X, the report said. The company is also focusing on training Grok for work in the finance sector by teaching it to read documents and Excel spreadsheets and to handle financial modeling, per the report. xAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. It was reported in April that SpaceX was demanding that banks, lawyers and other advisers who want access to the company's long-awaited IPO must subscribe to Grok. Some of the banks have agreed to spend millions on Grok subscriptions and have begun integrating it into their IT systems, according to the report. SpaceX's IPO is expected to raise more than $50 billion at a valuation of upwards of $1 trillion, meaning banks could realize fees of more than $500 million for advising on the listing, according to the April report. It was reported in March that xAI was hiring bankers and private credit lenders to provide lessons as part of the company's effort to make Grok better at offering financial strategies. The company aimed to recruit Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts for its data annotation teams that train the chatbot. These professionals are expected to help Grok reason through things like leveraged loan syndication and collateralized loan obligations, according to the report. The March report said that other AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, had already introduced tools for financial analysts. When xAI announced in January, before its acquisition by SpaceX, that it raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round, the company said the financing would "accelerate our world-leading infrastructure buildout, enable the rapid development and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, and fuel groundbreaking research advancing xAI's core mission: Understanding the Universe."