
Elon Musk confirms usage caps were intentional, citing unsustainable costs relative to revenue
AI-generated summary
SpaceX recently reported in a filing that AI contributes 52% of company income and its 'Super Intelligence' division turned a $431 million profit.
Over Halloween weekend, some Grok Bot users awoke to something especially spooky: their weekly usage limits were unexpectedly maxed out, even if they hadn’t been using SpaceX’s agentic AI overnight. Some users reported on X that their usage jumped from as low as 50% to 100%.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed in an X post on Sunday that this was not a glitch.
“The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,” he wrote in a reply to a question from a user. He has not addressed the issue on his main feed, but has continued boasting that Grok Bot can help you buy gifts for your family.
Grok Bot has been positioned as a success story for the newly public SpaceX, which said in a filing last month that AI now makes up 52% of company income. Its renamed “Super Intelligence” division actually turned a profit of $431 million, which is a rarity in the AI industry. Its profit would’ve been higher if not for $1.2 billion of one-time costs related to its acquisition of Cursor. Musk recently referred to Grok Bot as having “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Musk has not yet shared how subscribers’ usage limits will be impacted moving forward.

Major supermarket chains in Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Estonia report suspected cyberattacks that remotely altered the temperatures of refrigeration units, raising concerns over food supply chain security and potential spoilage.

Ghostwriter Sally McGraw was denied a book proposal opportunity after AI detectors falsely flagged her writing sample as machine-generated, highlighting growing concerns over the unreliability of AI detection tools in publishing.

This newsletter covers the surge in U.S. demand for Chinese-made Mahjong sets, Anthropic's IPO risk disclosures regarding hardware dependency, the trend of corporate buyouts over layoffs, and the growing prevalence of bot traffic on the internet.

In the New York Times' case against OpenAI, the Wikimedia Foundation argues that training artificial intelligence should be considered fair use, while verbatim regurgitation of articles should not.

A Megaspeed executive, Alice Huang, faces allegations of illegal Nvidia chip sales to China and suspected espionage. U.S. intelligence reportedly surveilled her over concerns regarding her proximity to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and potential access to trade secrets.

Former Palantir executives Andy Alder and Arjun Mather have launched Dream, an AI startup that automates building design and engineering. The company secured $17 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz to replace legacy AEC software.