Sunday, July 12, 2026

Musk tells Tesla staff to switch to xAI's Grok

Tesla

Elon Musk sent Tesla employees a memo on July 10 urging them to move to Grok, the AI model from his own startup xAI, 'when possible,' citing Grok 4.5's lower token costs versus rivals and asking engineers to email him feedback on the model directly. The push follows Tesla's decision days earlier to cap employee spending on third-party AI tools at $200 a week - a limit that applies to models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google but pointedly exempts Grok. After media coverage, Musk clarified he had only asked teams to test Grok 4.5 for specific tasks and to keep using competing models where they perform better.