- Elon Musk directed Tesla staff to adopt xAI’s Grok 4.5, citing lower token costs than competing models.
- The directive follows a $200 weekly cap on employee spending for external AI tools and coincides with Grok 4.5’s release.
- Musk’s companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, are tightly interconnected through talent sharing, technology transfers, and joint investments.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly directed staff at the electric vehicle company to shift toward using Grok, the AI model from his Artificial Intelligence company xAI, citing its significantly lower token costs compared to competing models, according to The Information. Musk asked engineers to email him directly with feedback on the model’s performance.
The directive follows Tesla’s decision earlier in the week to impose a $200 weekly cap on individual employee spending for external AI tools, effective Monday. The move coincides with the release of Grok 4.5 on Wednesday to counter Anthropic’s recent model Claude Fable 5.
The model was developed jointly with Cursor, the AI coding platform whose parent company SpaceX is acquiring in a deal valued at $60 billion. SpaceXAI has described Grok 4.5 as optimized for engineering, coding, scientific work, and general productivity tasks.
The fresh directive is the latest example of Elon Musk’s long-standing approach of tightly interconnecting his various companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, xAI/SpaceXAI, and The Boring Company, through talent sharing, technology transfers, financial investments, and joint projects. SpaceXAI’s Grok powers in-car voice assistance in Tesla vehicles, and SpaceX and Tesla are together developing a massive semiconductor fabrication called Terafab.
The companies are also invested in one another. Tesla announced a $2 billion investment in xAI earlier in 2026, which transferred to investment in SpaceX after the rocket manufacturer acquired the Grok parent earlier this year.
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around TSLA stock stayed within the ‘bullish’ territory over the past 24 hours, while message volume remained at ‘normal’ levels. Meanwhile, sentiment around SpaceX remained ‘bearish,’ accompanied by ‘extremely low’ message volume.
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