According to sources familiar with the matter, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has invited several Wall Street institutions with close ties to his business empire to test its Grok chatbot. This arrangement is seen as one of the measures to boost revenue for its parent company, SpaceX, ahead of its anticipated IPO.
Sources say that Apollo Global Management and Morgan Stanley have begun using Grok internally, while also utilizing software from other AI model manufacturers. Valor Equity Partners is likewise using Grok. However, despite some banks signing up for the product, financial professionals rarely call upon this chatbot in their actual work.
To establish a foothold in the financial sector, xAI is leveraging Musk’s personal network of relationships. Apollo is closely collaborating with xAI on NVIDIA (NVDA) chip financing; Morgan Stanley has been Musk’s bank of choice for many years and is expected to take on a senior underwriting role in SpaceX’s IPO; Valor Equity Partners, led by Musk’s long-time ally Antonio Gracias, is an investor in both xAI and SpaceX.
Previously, the majority of xAI’s sales came from transactions with other companies in Musk’s ecosystem, including SpaceX and Tesla. In the eyes of the financial industry, however, its tools are generally considered inferior to those of competitors OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. On the eve of a potential merger with SpaceX, xAI’s monthly cash burn was approaching $1 billion.
As xAI moves into the financial sector, the company is facing leadership changes. According to internal documents seen by sources, xAI’s Chief Revenue Officer, Jon Shulkin, will step down from his role at the company and transition to an advisory position. Shulkin, also a partner at Valor, has been a key advocate for the company’s enterprise sales strategy.
Executives at xAI, including Shulkin, have promoted Grok’s ability to scrape internal company information for performance evaluations and to leverage data from Musk’s social platform X. Currently, xAI is building out its enterprise sales team under the leadership of Graham Seamans. One source familiar with the matter stated that internal employees have been told that training Grok specifically for the financial sector is a top priority. This includes teaching the chatbot to proficiently read documents and Excel spreadsheets, while also hiring credit and finance experts to assist in training it to build financial models. Michael Nichols, President of xAI and an executive at Starlink, wrote in an internal memo last month: “Our short-term goal is to match Claude’s performance.”
