Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has invited several Wall Street institutions with close ties to his billionaire business empire to test its Grok chatbot, according to informed sources. This arrangement is part of a push to boost revenue ahead of the initial public offering of its parent company, SpaceX. Sources indicate that Apollo Global Management LLC and Morgan Stanley have begun using Grok internally, while also utilizing software from other AI model manufacturers. Valor Equity Partners is also reportedly using Grok. Although some banks have signed up for Grok, sources note that financial professionals rarely call upon the chatbot in their actual work. Musk's AI startup is intensifying efforts to increase revenue through sales of chatbot subscriptions and providing access to computing resources, as SpaceX is expected to go public next month. To date, most of xAI's sales have come from transactions with Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and Tesla Motors; within the financial industry, its tools are generally considered inferior to those of competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. On the eve of its merger with SpaceX, xAI's monthly cash burn is approaching $1 billion. To establish a foothold in finance, Musk's company is leveraging his personal network. Apollo Global Management LLC maintains close cooperation with xAI on financing for NVIDIA chips. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley, which has been Musk's preferred bank for years, is expected to play a senior underwriting role in SpaceX's IPO. Additionally, Valor Equity Partners, led by Musk's long-time ally Antonio Gracias, is an investor in both xAI and SpaceX. As xAI moves into finance, the company is also undergoing leadership changes. Internal documents reviewed by sources show that Jon Shulkin, xAI's chief revenue officer and a key advocate for the strategy of selling Grok to corporate clients, is stepping down from his role at the company. The documents indicate that Shulkin, who is also a partner at Valor, has transitioned to an advisory position. xAI executives and sales personnel, including Shulkin, have promoted Grok's utility for tasks such as extracting internal company information for performance reviews and leveraging data from Musk's social media platform X. Under the leadership of Graham Seaman, who joined the company last year, xAI is also striving to build out its enterprise sales team. Both OpenAI and Anthropic view the financial sector as a key growth area for their businesses, as Wall Street institutions tend to adopt AI early and often hold software licenses long-term. However, Grok generally lags behind competitors' services in areas such as code optimization and other high-value tasks. An internal source stated that xAI employees have been informed that training Grok for the financial domain is a top priority, noting that the company has been reallocating personnel to focus on this financial strategy. This includes teaching the chatbot to proficiently read documents and Excel spreadsheets, similar to Anthropic's Claude. xAI is also hiring credit and finance experts to assist in training Grok to build financial models. In an internal memo last month, xAI President and Starlink executive Michael Nichols wrote, "Our short-term goal is to match Claude's performance."
The Largest IPO in History 2026
The global capital markets are set for an unprecedented capital event in 2026. Musk's SpaceX has confidentially filed for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, planning to raise up to $75 billion and targeting a valuation between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion. This scale would not only surpass the $29.4 billion IPO fundraising record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 but would also immediately place SpaceX among the world's highest-valued publicly traded companies. The surge in SpaceX's valuation is a spectacle in business history. In December 2025, the company was valued at $800 billion in an internal stock tender offer. By February 2026, after Musk merged the AI company xAI into SpaceX in an all-stock transaction, the combined entity's valuation jumped to $1.25 trillion. Now, factoring in IPO premium effects, the market's valuation range has climbed to $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion. The core of this valuation logic lies in a qualitative transformation of the business model. SpaceX has evolved from a pure rocket launch company into a vertically integrated platform deeply combining space infrastructure with artificial intelligence. Estimates suggest that in 2025, the Starlink business generated approximately $10.6 billion in revenue, with EBITDA of $5.8 billion and a 54% profit margin, accounting for over two-thirds of the company's total revenue. The launch business contributed $5.2 billion in revenue, with $1.7 billion in EBITDA and a 33% margin. Starlink is considered a "cash cow," while the integration of xAI injects the company with the narrative potential of AI. SpaceX plans to allocate the IPO proceeds primarily towards three areas: the mass production and iteration of Starship, massive investments in computing clusters following the merger with xAI, and the global expansion of the Starlink hardware network.
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