Winners & losers: It appears that even the richest man in the world has had to acknowledge that the cost of running AI is spiraling out of control. Elon Musk just admitted that Grok Bot users are hitting their usage limits much faster than usual this week due to "unsustainably high" costs relative to the revenue it generates.
Musk made the admission in a reply to an X user who asked for a usage reset after running out 4 days early. They added that lots of people had complained about their usage running out quickly over the last week.
"The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue," Musk replied.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
Unsurprisingly, many people aren't happy about this. Grok users who say they never normally hit their 100% limit are now doing so, even without using AI agents or having Grok Bot work on heavy tasks.
One user said they went from 56% usage to 100% in one hour, while another said the usage cap had been slashed in half.
Some Redditors are angry that their usage limits were cut without them being informed ahead of time. One person claims that based on their usage, Grok Bot is essentially 3 times more expensive now – the term "indirect rug pull" has been used a lot.
Access to Grok Bot starts at $30 for the Premium tier. The Super tier is $100 per month, and there's an Ultra tier for $200 per month. Both offer much higher usage limits.
When one person on X complained about the situation, Musk asked if upgrading to the higher usage plan would be too expensive. It's unclear if only the cheapest plan or all of them were affected by the usage cuts.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The move comes just weeks after Musk called Grok Bot the fastest-growing product he has ever seen. "As we make Grok Bot more useful, we're seeing users use it more per week, not use it less," he said. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said there were 800,000 paying weekly Grok Bot users in early October, double the previous month's users.
Musk has not revealed any exact figures relating to Grok Bot's costs or the revenue it generates.
High costs have become a major issue across the AI industry. A June analysis found that fully utilizing a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription could equate to $14,000 in API charges. Meanwhile, OpenAI's cost of revenue reached $7.5 billion in 2025, reflecting the expense of serving the millions of people using its models.
Wall Street is becoming increasingly nervous about whether these investments will ever pay off. The Nasdaq 100 fell more than 5.8% in October as investors questioned Big Tech's ballooning AI spending. Citadel's Ken Griffin recently suggested that the AI boom is almost certainly a bubble, warning that businesses aren't consistently getting enough value from the technology to justify the expense.