- xAI has signed up Apollo Global Management, Morgan Stanley, and Valor Equity Partners to pilot Grok internally, but sources say financiers are “rarely using the chatbot for work.”
- The push is revenue-driven: xAI was burning nearly $1 billion per month before its SpaceX merger and needs enterprise deals ahead of SpaceX’s expected IPO next month.
- Jon Shulkin, xAI’s chief revenue officer and the architect of its enterprise sales strategy, has stepped back from his role and moved into an advisory position.
- xAI’s internal goal: match Anthropic’s Claude at reading documents and Excel spreadsheets — the company is shifting staff and hiring credit experts to train Grok on finance.
What Happened?
Elon Musk’s xAI is aggressively courting Wall Street ahead of parent company SpaceX’s expected IPO next month, recruiting Apollo Global Management, Morgan Stanley, and Valor Equity Partners to test its Grok chatbot internally. The connections run through Musk’s personal network: Apollo financed Nvidia chips for xAI, Morgan Stanley is a longtime Musk banking relationship and expected SpaceX IPO underwriter, and Valor is run by longtime Musk ally Antonio Gracias, who is an investor in both xAI and SpaceX. Despite the sign-ups, sources say actual usage remains thin — financiers are “rarely using the chatbot for work.” Meanwhile, xAI’s chief revenue officer Jon Shulkin, who spearheaded the enterprise pitch, has stepped back from his role into an advisory position.
Why It Matters?
Wall Street is a critical beachhead for AI model makers — finance firms adopt AI early, pay well, and sign long-term licenses. OpenAI and Anthropic have made it a priority, and Claude is widely regarded as the gold standard for document analysis and spreadsheet work. xAI is playing catch-up: its tools are “widely viewed as inferior” to rivals for finance use cases, and the company’s internal memo sets a blunt near-term target: “match performance of Claude.” The timing pressure is acute. xAI burned through roughly $1 billion a month before its SpaceX merger, and the looming IPO creates a hard deadline to show revenue momentum beyond related-party deals with Tesla and SpaceX.
What’s Next?
xAI is restructuring its enterprise sales push under Graham Seamans, who joined last year, and has been actively hiring credit analysts and finance experts to train Grok on financial modeling. The departure of Shulkin — who was also the face of Grok’s corporate pitches — introduces leadership uncertainty at a sensitive moment. Whether Grok can close the gap with Claude on document and spreadsheet comprehension before SpaceX’s IPO roadshow will be a key test. If enterprise adoption stays shallow, the IPO narrative around xAI’s standalone commercial viability becomes much harder to sell.
Source: Bloomberg
