Elon Musk Needs to Save Money on Grok, Days After Saying AI Makes Saving Money Pointless

On Friday afternoon, Elon Musk confidently declared to the world that “Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance.” Three days later, the same Elon Musk said the cost of running AI was getting a little too steep even for him, and that he needed to start saving a little money. The billionaire appears to have imposed a tighter-than-usual weekly token limit on Grok Bot, the always-on AI agent launched by his company xAI in August, due to its out-of-control tab. “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,” Musk wrote in an X post Sunday afternoon responding to a user who complained they’d hit their weekly usage limit earlier than usual, and asked Musk personally for a reset. Multiple users chimed in to say they were surprised to see their Grok Bot token allowances had been suddenly and inexplicably depleted. “I was at 68% yesterday and woke up to 98%,” one person wrote in an X post. “What’s it called when you take away something someone already paid for? Isn’t that theft?” Another wrote, “Is Elon joking or are we getting royally screwed here? My usage went from 58% to 100% in less than an hour with nothing running. What is going on?” It’s unclear if xAI will permanently enforce a stricter token limit moving forward or if this was a one-off emergency measure; the company didn’t immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment. Developed in response to other popular AI agents like OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse, Grok Bot has been promoted by xAI as a kind of virtual teammate that can be trusted to handle complex tasks while also checking back in for human approval when needed. Like Dots and Muse, Grok Bot runs on its own virtual computer (rather than on users’ devices) and can operate around the clock, even when users are offline. That makes them much more sophisticated than more limited chatbots, but it also means they tend to burn through tokens at a quicker rate. Tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, and xAI have therefore been trying to balance capability with cost: shipping ever-more agentic consumer AI tools while simultaneously being mindful of users’ budgets. And of their own. While Muse is free—a big factor behind its popularity—Dots and Grok Bot are currently only available to paying customers. Judging from Musk’s Sunday X post, there haven’t been enough Grok subscribers willing to pay for the agent to justify its continued strain on xAI’s servers. (Grok Bot subscribers are given a weekly “pool” of tokens to use, which varies depending on the plan. They also have the option of paying for “on-demand” credits which the agent can use after the weekly pool has run out.) Musk may have also been keeping an eye on user complaints and decided it was better to simply stifle the system rather than have to deal with a class action lawsuit from disgruntled subscribers, as its competitor Anthropic has had to do. In any event, probably a good call for everyone to keep saving for the future.