Musk says Grok Bot costs were 'unsustainably high' as users hit limits early

What Musk said on Sunday

Subscribers reported that their weekly Grok Bot allowances ran out days before the reset. On Sunday, 1 November 2026, a user replying to Elon Musk on X asked for the weekly allowance to be reset. Musk confirmed that the drop in usage was not a glitch and explained it in a reply:

“The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”

Musk did not say what the agent costs to run, how much revenue it brings in, or whether allowances will change. In other replies he asked a user whether a plan with more usage cost too much, and his answers were read as a defence of smaller allowances. He has kept promoting the agent as a way to buy gifts for family while the limits have been in place.

Usage meters jump without use

Users said their meters moved sharply while they were not using the agent, and several said their allowance was used up while they slept. One meter went from 33% to 66%, and other posts described jumps from 50% to 100%, from 35% to 78% and from 70% to 100%. Members of Cursor's community forum described weekly figures that swung between 77% and 100% while their activity stayed the same. Cursor reported a billing and usage-dashboard problem on Sunday and later marked it resolved, but it is not clear whether that problem caused the jumps. Grok Bot is separate from the Grok chatbot. It runs on a virtual computer and carries out tasks such as shopping, with plans up to $200 a month. In October Musk said the agent would also draw on Claude, Midjourney and Suno.

Growth figures from the earnings call

SpaceX held its third-quarter earnings call less than two weeks before the posts. On that call, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users in early October, more than double the figure a month earlier. Musk spoke on the same call and said he had seen nothing like it:

“I've never seen anything grow this fast.”

A filing last month said AI accounts for 52% of company income. The renamed Super Intelligence division posted a profit of $431 million, which would have been higher without $1.2 billion of one-time costs linked to the acquisition of Cursor. Musk added that the agent might come to account for most of the company's computing capacity.

Pricing pressure across AI products

Other AI providers face similar economics. Users of tools such as ChatGPT and Claude Code can spend many times more in tokens than their monthly subscriptions cost. OpenAI is reported to merge its ChatGPT and Codex allowances in December 2026, which would let people who use both reach their caps sooner. One Reddit thread called Musk's change an "indirect rug pull", describing a move that cut features and usage to lower costs. Musk has not yet said how subscribers' usage limits will change from here.