Catenaa, Saturday, April 04, 2026- Elon Musk is requiring banks and other advisers working on SpaceX’s planned IPO to buy subscriptions to Grok.
The New York Times reported on Friday that some banks have agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars a year on the chatbot and have begun integrating it into their IT systems.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup are serving as active bookrunners, or the lead banks managing the deal, Reuters reported earlier this week.
For almost any major initial public offering, banks find ways to ingratiate themselves with the company going public, as well as its chief executive.
But after several years with few significant public offerings coming to market, Wall Street has been salivating for a deal like SpaceX, which is forecast to be one of the largest in history.
The IPO. is expected to raise more than $50 billion at a valuation above $1 trillion, which means the banks could generate fees in excess of $500 million for advising on the deal.
The Starbase, Texas-headquartered rocket maker, boosted its target initial public offering valuation above $2 trillion, according to a Bloomberg News report a day earlier, setting the stage for what could become the largest stock market listing on record.
Musk’s ability to secure business from the banks for his AI chatbot also shows the enormous sway of the world’s richest man over a banking sector clamoring for his business now and into the future.
The banks’ purchases of Grok subscriptions were not merely goodwill gestures, according to three people with knowledge of the arrangements.
Musk insisted that they purchase the chatbot services. He has also asked the banks to advertise on X, his social media site, which is also owned by SpaceX, but was less adamant about that request, the report said.
Musk’s agreement with banks is a big score for SpaceX, which merged with xAI in February and whose Grok is a distant fourth in the artificial intelligence race behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
Musk has marketed Grok as the antidote to political correctness and said his chatbot would not be “woke,” unlike its competitors.
Despite its problems, Musk has continued to promote the chatbot, regularly urging his more than 237 million followers on X to “try Grok.”
As of noon on Friday in New York, he had posted 18 times that day about the chatbot, which had launched a new version of its app on Thursday.
“Grok & xAI are definitely improving faster than any other AI,” read one message on X that Musk reposted.
Grok generates revenue mostly from individuals rather than from businesses. The subscriptions from the banks will give the so-called enterprise part of the artificial intelligence arm a boost ahead of SpaceX’s IPO.
In its most recent financial report to investors before the SpaceX merger, xAI reported roughly $1 billion in revenue from its artificial intelligence operations, according to a person who viewed the results.
The company did not indicate how much came from its consumers or business customers.
