Elon Musk Is Forcing Wall Street Banks to Buy Grok Subscriptions. The Price of Admission: A $1.75 Trillion IPO.
Banks want in on the biggest IPO in history. Musk says fine, but first you need to subscribe to his AI chatbot that nobody asked for.
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If you want a seat at the table for what could be the largest IPO in human history, Elon Musk has one condition: buy Grok.
According to the New York Times, Musk is requiring every bank, law firm, auditor, and adviser working on SpaceX's planned IPO to purchase subscriptions to his AI chatbot. Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and law firms Gibson Dunn and Davis Polk are all reportedly on the hook. The IPO is targeting a valuation north of $2 trillion, which means banks could collect over $500 million in advisory fees. So yeah, a few Grok subscriptions is not the hill anyone's dying on.
But let's be honest about what this actually is: the richest person on Earth using his most valuable asset to prop up his least valuable one.
Grok sits in a distant fourth place behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in the AI chatbot race. It is not winning on quality. It is not winning on adoption. It is not winning on enterprise trust. What it does have is Elon Musk and the gravitational pull of a SpaceX IPO that every major bank on Wall Street wants a piece of.
This is the Musk playbook in its purest form. Tesla employees were pressured to use X. Government contractors now interface with DOGE. SpaceX merged with xAI specifically to bundle the chatbot into the IPO story. And now the banks underwriting that IPO are being told to use the product. It is not a business strategy. It is a loyalty test disguised as an enterprise subscription.
The question regulators should be asking: does requiring IPO advisers to purchase a product from the company they are advising cross any lines? SpaceX is not a public company yet, so SEC disclosure rules are limited. But the optics of using a $1.75 trillion IPO as leverage to inflate a struggling AI product's subscription numbers are, at minimum, uncomfortable.
Here is what happens next: the banks will comply. They will buy the subscriptions, expense them, and probably never open Grok. The fees from this IPO are too large to risk over a chatbot subscription. Musk knows this. He is not trying to convert Goldman Sachs into Grok power users. He is trying to inflate subscription numbers before the S-1 filing so Grok looks like a growth story instead of a pet project.
That is the real play here. Not adoption. Metrics.