Elon Musk has found the ultimate AI distribution hack: make it a condition of doing business with him.

According to the New York Times, Musk is requiring every bank, law firm, auditor, and adviser working on SpaceXs upcoming IPO to buy subscriptions to Grok, his AI chatbot that now lives inside SpaceX following the xAI merger. Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are all expected to work on the offering. Law firms Gibson Dunn and Davis Polk are advising on the deal. All of them must subscribe to Grok.

This is not a polite suggestion. When you are competing for a piece of what could be the largest IPO in history, with fees potentially exceeding $500 million, you do what the client wants. And Musk knows it.

Bloomberg reported that SpaceX has boosted its target valuation to more than $2 trillion, up from the $1.25 trillion reported when SpaceX and xAI merged two months ago. At that scale, the IPO could raise more than $50 billion in a single offering. The banks will pay whatever Grok subscription fees Musk demands and consider it a rounding error.

But zoom out and this is actually brilliant, if slightly unhinged. Musk has struggled to make Grok competitive with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in the consumer market. So instead of winning users on merit, he is using his leverage as the person behind the most anticipated IPO in history to force enterprise adoption. Every banker at Goldman Sachs who touches this deal now has a Grok account. Every associate at Davis Polk is logging into Grok instead of ChatGPT.

Will it move the needle on Groks market share? Probably not. Five banks and two law firms do not make a user base. But it tells you everything about how Musk thinks about distribution: if you cannot win the market, force the market to come to you.

The real question is what happens when the IPO closes. Do Goldman Sachs bankers keep using Grok? Or does every subscription quietly lapse the moment the deal is done? If you had to bet, you already know the answer.