Musk Requires Banks to Buy Grok Subscriptions and Advertise on X for SpaceX IPO Access
Want to advise on the biggest IPO of the decade? First, you'll need to buy a subscription to Elon Musk's AI chatbot. That's the deal Wall Street's top banks have apparently agreed to in order to secure roles in SpaceX's upcoming initial public offering, according to a New York Times report.
The Price of Admission
Elon Musk is requiring banks, law firms, auditors, and other advisers working on SpaceX's IPO to purchase subscriptions to Grok, his AI chatbot that became part of SpaceX after the company merged with xAI in February 2026. Some banks have already agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars on Grok subscriptions and have started integrating the chatbot into their IT systems.
The five banks expected to work on the offering are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. Law firms Gibson Dunn and Davis Polk are also advising on the deal. Musk has additionally asked these banks to advertise on X (formerly Twitter), though he was "less adamant" about that request.
Why Banks Are Playing Along
The answer is simple: money. SpaceX's IPO is expected to raise more than $50 billion at a valuation above $1 trillion, generating fees exceeding $500 million for the advising banks. After several years of lackluster IPO activity, Wall Street has been desperate for a deal of this magnitude.
As former Twitter executive Lara Cohen put it on X: "Crap on pre-Elon Twitter all you want, but we had a $6 billion dollar sales business that didn't rely on extortion to get deals done."
Grok's Awkward Position
What makes this particularly uncomfortable is Grok's standing in the AI market. The chatbot is a distant fourth behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini. Even at Tesla, many engineers were reportedly choosing Claude over Grok before the SpaceX merger.
More troubling, Grok has been mired in controversy. The chatbot has shared antisemitic content and praise of Adolf Hitler, and generated nonconsensual sexualized images of women and girls. Indonesia and Malaysia have banned Grok outright, while other countries have opened investigations.
Despite all this, Musk continues promoting Grok relentlessly — posting about it 18 times in a single day, according to the Times, and regularly urging his 237 million X followers to "try Grok."
Starlink: The Real Crown Jewel
The irony of the Grok requirement is that SpaceX's real value has nothing to do with AI chatbots. Starlink, the company's satellite internet service, is the crown jewel, generating approximately $8 billion in revenue in 2024 and producing billions in free cash flow. xAI's total AI revenue was roughly $1 billion, with most coming from individual consumers rather than enterprise customers.
The Grok subscriptions from banks will give SpaceX's enterprise AI arm a boost ahead of the IPO — which is presumably the point. SpaceX confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC this week, though it notably left the names of banks off the filing.
The Bottom Line
There's a word for when the world's richest man leverages a trillion-dollar IPO to force banks to buy his fourth-place AI product: leverage. Wall Street may call it "relationship building." Everyone else might call it something else entirely. But when $500 million in fees is on the line, banks will apparently buy whatever chatbot you're selling.