xAI Recruits Apollo, Morgan Stanley to Test Grok Ahead of SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk's xAI is racing to plant Grok inside Wall Street's biggest firms before SpaceX goes public. According to Bloomberg, Apollo Global Management, Morgan Stanley, and Valor Equity Partners have all begun using the chatbot internally — and several of them have direct financial ties to Musk's broader empire.

The push, reported May 13, is xAI's most concentrated enterprise sales effort to date and reframes Grok's positioning. After a year of consumer downloads sliding and frontier-model competitors pulling ahead, the company is leaning on Musk's relationships to build a financial-services beachhead before the spotlight of an IPO arrives.

Who's Testing, and Why It's Familiar

The list of pilot firms is short and pointed. Apollo Global Management, the alternative-asset manager that has helped finance xAI's Nvidia chip purchases, is testing Grok internally. Morgan Stanley, Musk's go-to investment bank for years, is doing the same and is widely expected to take a senior role in the SpaceX IPO. Valor Equity Partners, the firm founded by longtime Musk ally Antonio Gracias, is also using the product.

Two patterns jump out. First, every named firm has a pre-existing commercial relationship with Musk or one of his companies. Second, financiers at the participating firms are rarely using the chatbot for actual work, according to people Bloomberg spoke with. The early footprint is a function of relationships, not pull-through demand.

That doesn't make the strategy unsound. Pilots from name-brand institutions are reference accounts that other prospective customers want to see. Whether the early users become daily users is a separate question — one xAI has roughly two quarters to answer if it wants Grok to feature in the SpaceX prospectus as a revenue story rather than a research narrative.

The Pre-IPO Push Is the Whole Plot

SpaceX, which recently acquired xAI, is the company carrying both businesses toward a public listing. Bloomberg's reporting frames the Wall Street push explicitly as part of that timing — xAI is trying to bolster revenue ahead of SpaceX's IPO. A prospectus describing Grok as a chatbot with declining downloads is a different document than one describing Grok as a financial-services AI in pilots with Apollo and Morgan Stanley.

xAI has internally told employees that training Grok specifically for the financial sector is a top priority. The work includes teaching the chatbot to parse documents and Excel spreadsheets proficiently, plus hiring credit and finance experts to help train it to build financial models. That is the same vertical that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cohere are all targeting — Anthropic shipped Claude Finance in early May, and OpenAI launched its ChatGPT personal-finance product on May 15.

The competitive bar is high. JPMorgan announced a $19.8 billion 2026 technology budget centered on AI infrastructure. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been running internal LLM evaluations for over a year. Wall Street is not short on AI options. xAI's pitch has to clear that bar inside firms that already know how to evaluate it.

The Consumer Story Is Going the Other Way

The strategic pivot toward enterprise comes against a consumer backdrop that has gotten worse, not better. Grok's monthly downloads fell from 20 million in January to 8.3 million in April — a roughly 60% decline in four months. Sora-style virality has not materialized for Musk's chatbot the way it briefly did for OpenAI's video products, and the consumer brand has been weighed down by repeated content controversies.

In April, xAI shipped Grok4 Fast, a faster and far cheaper variant that delivers comparable performance to Grok4 with 40% fewer reasoning tokens and a 98% price reduction. The unit economics improvement is real. It does not, by itself, reverse the consumer download trajectory or close the perception gap with Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 on agentic coding benchmarks.

SpaceX-Anthropic Adds a Twist

The strangest piece of context is that SpaceX — xAI's new parent — recently struck a deal worth as much as $4 million in annual revenue to lease Anthropic the entire capacity of its Colossus 1 data center. Musk publicly confirmed the arrangement. Anthropic is, in every meaningful sense, xAI's frontier-model rival.

The deal reads two ways. One reading: Musk is hedging by treating compute as a saleable commodity, with xAI competing on chatbot product while SpaceX-owned infrastructure serves whoever pays. The other reading: xAI is conceding the frontier-model arms race and pivoting toward neocloud services — selling compute, including from satellites in low Earth orbit, while Grok becomes a vertical product in finance rather than a horizontal foundation model. The Wall Street recruitment fits the second reading neatly.

What the Pilots Need to Prove

For the pilots to convert into revenue that materially helps the SpaceX prospectus, three things have to happen in the next two quarters. The financial-tuned Grok variant has to actually outperform incumbent options on the document, spreadsheet, and financial-modeling tasks the pilot firms care about. Daily active use inside Apollo, Morgan Stanley, and Valor has to climb from "rarely" to "regularly." And xAI has to land non-Musk-affiliated reference customers — banks and asset managers without a pre-existing commercial relationship to the founder.

None of those three is impossible. None is in evidence yet, either.

Bottom Line

xAI is using Musk's network to put Grok in front of the firms that matter most for the SpaceX IPO story. That gets the company pilots. It doesn't get the company revenue, daily usage, or independent validation — and those are the metrics that determine whether Grok's financial-services bet shows up as a real line in a prospectus or as a footnote. The next two quarters will tell which one investors get.