XAI tests Grok on Wall Street ahead of SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI is testing its Grok chatbot with Wall Street firms Apollo Global Management, Morgan Stanley, and Valor Equity Partners ahead of SpaceX’s expected IPO next month.

Apollo and Morgan Stanley have started using Grok internally.

Much of xAI revenue so far has come from Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and Tesla.

Grok is generally seen as behind OpenAI and Anthropic in finance tasks.

CRO Jon Shulkin has moved into an advisory role as xAI shifts staff and hiring toward training Grok for finance work.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Grok’s finance push follows a $1.25 trillion merger and precedes an expected IPO

The finance move follows SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion 1.
The deal aimed to give xAI more capital as it spent heavily to build infrastructure against OpenAI and Anthropic 1.
The shift also arrives before SpaceX’s expected IPO later this year 1.
The staffing moves are part of a wider post-merger reshuffle that included xAI chief financial officer (CFO) Anthony Armstrong leaving, along with reports that several co-founders exited over time 2.

Grok’s enterprise push reveals AI’s revenue and safety hurdles

xAI faces a broad industry problem as model makers struggle to win enough paying customers to cover huge computing bills 3.
That revenue hunt runs into weak returns. A recent MIT study found 95% of 52 organizations got no return on investment after spending $30 billion to $40 billion on generative AI across more than 300 initiatives 4.
In finance, Grok also brings reputational risk after users of X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, used Grok Imagine to create and share non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors 5.
That may give OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude an opening on trust and safety, which could slow Grok in cautious fields such as financial services 5.