The Archive

Elon Musk reduces Grok Bot usage limits citing unsustainably high operational costs despite rapid user growth.

Elon Musk reports Grok Bot serving costs unsustainably high relative to X Premium revenue after rapid usage limit depletion.

Musk warns of AI neocloud collapses amid debt while Huang remains bullish on 200+ GPU rental ventures' survival.

Mars not depicted. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger! The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or "spread the light of consciousness," as he put it in this week's SpaceX earnings call (and earlier S-1). Now, a reasonably informed person knows that we don't have the ...

Though movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually stacked with features that take a much more critical look at how Silicon Valley is reshaping our reality. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning frames Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions are destabilizing society. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything paints a damning picture of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as she prepares for her ongoing stint in prison. After years of being widely celebrated as a visionary, you can see how the larger narrative around Elon Musk has ...

When President Donald Trump announced his plans to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," you'd be forgiven for being skeptical that it would catch on. While most of the broader population is sticking with AI, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful are falling in line and trying to give Trump the great AI rebrand he so desires. That Elon Musk was quick to jump on board, promising to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, isn't surprising. When, hours after Donald Trump declared that "The White House considers anyone that uses the term, 'Artificial Intelligence,' as opposed to the high...

If Elon Musk and SpaceXAI were going to back any Linux distro, it seems obvious they'd back Omarchy. Today it was announced that SpaceXAI would be joining the Omacom Foundation, which oversees Omarchy, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donating $1.5 million worth of Grok tokens to David Heinemeier Hansson's Linux project. According to Hansson's blog post announcing the partnership, the tokens will primarily be used to accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. Hansson is the Danish entrepreneur known for creating Ruby on Rails and co-founding the company behind Basecamp. But he's a...

Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google's Demis Hassabis calls the brain "a biological approximation to a Turing machine." Elon Musk puts it more bluntly, declaring that "people should just think of the brain as a biological computer." (Musk's brain often worries me.) But humans are more complex than a straightforward comparison to computers gives us credit for - and far more than most of the AI industry see...

In a throwback to MySpace-style internet drama, Shivon Zilis announced that she and the father of four of her children, Elon Musk, had broken up on X. To do so, she quote-tweeted a post from "Big Tech Alert," an account that, among other things, monitors what accounts are following and unfollowing each other. That post noted Musk was no longer following her on X. It was also sponsored by Kalshi, because everything in this relationship is totally fucking cursed, dude. In her statement, Zilis wrote, "It's hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that's just how it is som...

Grokipedia, SpaceXAI's AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia, recently started incorporating edits again, and today, it got some design tweaks as part of a v0.3 update, including a new logo and refreshes to its homepage and live edits page. SpaceXAI head of design Benji Taylor calls it a "newly refreshed Grokipedia." Grokipedia's old homepage was pretty much just a logo and a search bar, but the updated homepage includes a list of featured articles, a list of the most-read articles, and a tracker showing the "latest edits." The new featured list showcases digital representations of books that yo...

Before OpenAI launched its new AI agent, Dots, on Tuesday, Elon Musk's xAI had already acquired the domain name "dot.com," which now redirects to the Grok chatbot download page.

Elon Musk | Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Grokipedia, the AI-powered online encyclopedia from SpaceXAI, appears to be updating articles once again after a months-long pause. In August, Lawfare reported that articles on Grokipedia hadn't reviewed edits since April, but the platform's live updates site is now showing various recent changes to pages - though as I write this, many are just a note that says "recheck all references and sources." The site seems to have become active again relatively recently. The page for President Barack Obama has a note that says it was "Fact-checked by Grok" t...

At the start of this week, the who's-who of AI seemed - at least tentatively - on the side of AI regulation. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including by embedding third-party evaluators in labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements potentially with government assistance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly seemed to agree on aspects of all three things. Anthropic and OpenAI had already been dropping hints that ...

Over the past few days, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI all publicly agreed that it's time to make everyone slow down before we lose control - including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and X CEO Elon Musk. When people who profit from something declare that it's dangerous and needs to be regulated, there's always reason to be skeptical. But whatever their reason, this is far from the first time AI thought leaders have sounded the alarm. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution prompte...

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX head Elon Musk loosely agreed over the weekend to slow down AI development, skeptics spotted an ulterior motive immediately. The AI titans had declared that their aim was to "pace the frontier," signing on at least partially to a proposal for embedding third-party auditors, regulating domestic labs, and reaching a global slowdown agreement. Their critics, however, argued they simply wanted to stop would-be competitors, kneecap the open-source movement, and avoid real legal safeguards -...

Though Elon Musk and Sam Altman have supported Dario Amodei's calls to slow the pace of AI development, Jensen Huang seems to feel differently.

Yesterday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy open letter saying it was time to "pace the frontier" and slow down AI development. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk both agreed, publicly voicing their support on X. Even Alphabet's Demis Hassabis offered tentative support for Amodei's proposal. Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, seem to think the AI executives are being overreactive and fear that a pause could lead to China outpacing the US in the AI race. According to the Financial Times, Trump said "Look, we're leading China in AI … and, frankly, I want to keep ...

Elon Musk says a secretive new SpaceX foundry will let him cast his own turbine blades and get gas power online 18 months faster than anyone else — but it's a bet on a fuel source that's already triggering lawsuits and health studies everywhere his (and others') turbines have gone in.

OpenAI restricts Cursor's API access amid dispute between Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

xAI accused of training Grok on real and AI-generated child pornography.

OpenAI has had a hell of a year. The company spent months battling former co-founder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial, was hit with a high-profile trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and faced widespread scrutiny after an unreleased model hacked another AI company. As it prepares for an IPO, a steady string of executives have departed, including some of the company's biggest names. Throughout it all, one person has quietly amassed power: Greg Brockman. Brockman is currently OpenAI's president and co-founder. He's helped lead OpenAI since its inception, described as an "engineering workhors...

On August 6th, the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center lost radar and communications for around two hours. The outage disrupted more than 1,100 flights across the center's 330,000 square mile, nine-state airspace sector. Two days earlier, on August 4th, President Donald Trump departed the White House inside his Marine One military helicopter. As Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) protocol requires, the pilots tried to contact Reagan National Airport to tell them to halt commercial traffic during the flight. But the air traffic controllers never heard the transmission and cleared a...

You’ll have to be fine with letting Grok sign into your online accounts, however. | Image: SpaceXAI SpaceXAI has introduced Grok Bot, an always-on AI agent service designed to behave like independent "AI teammates" that can do your work for you. The bots share their own cloud-based computer environment, and can sign into apps, tools, and websites you already use to complete multi-step workplace tasks, only coming back when their assigned work is completed or if something requires approval. Grok Bot (or Bots, as SpaceXAI inconsistently pluralizes it) is the latest push from Elon Musk's AI comp...

On the latest episode of Equity, we spoke to Jill Lepore about "government by machines" and why Elon Musk is a bad science fiction reader.

xAI's Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia with AI-generated articles that Elon Musk once promised would be a "massive improvement" over Wikipedia, apparently hasn't been updated since April 24th, according to a report from Lawfare. "As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months," Lawfare said. Grokipedia launched in v0.1 in October 2025 with an initial batch of 885,000 articles, and is now on v0.2 (released in November 2025) and has more than 6,000,000 total articles, according to grokipedia.com/live. But that live page also has a section titled "Recent changes to…" wit...

Privatize the profit, socialize the losses? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk's healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we're calling the whole thing SpaceX. Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX's first quarterly earnings statement as a public company. The space sector of the business didn't break a billion dollars this quarter and contributed only a touch over 10 percent of the company's rev...

An analysis of the last seven years of Tesla earnings calls shows just little attention Musk pays to Tesla's car business.

Musk defends Grok, says Minnesota's nudifying app ban is unconstitutional.

AUUUUUGH | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Index funds are touted as one of the safest ways to invest. Rather than picking and choosing individual stocks, index funds let you bet on the market as a whole. So what happens when a company like SpaceX - a giant gamble, and, in my opinion, terribly overpriced - is fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100? Does it suddenly threaten the stability of index funds based on the Nasdaq-100? Can a $1.77 trillion IPO crater the retirement funds of regular people who would ordinarily have no interest in investing in Elon Musk's meme stock? The answer...

Elon Musk's xAI files first lawsuit against Grok user accused of making child sex images.