The line came from the tech investor Ben Pouladian, quoted in a Wall Street Journal piece this week summarising new market data on AI chatbot adoption. It is a memorable framing, and it is unkind to the chatbot Elon Musk launched in late 2023 with the explicit goal of producing a less "woke" alternative to ChatGPT. The numbers behind it are worse than the metaphor suggests.
Grok downloads fell to roughly 8.3 million in April, down from a January peak of more than 20 million, according to AppMagic data cited in the report. The percentage of US consumers and workers paying for Grok was almost exactly flat year on year, sitting at 0.174 percent in the second quarter of 2026 versus 0.173 percent a year earlier. By comparison, more than 6 percent of respondents said they paid for ChatGPT. In effect, Grok's paid penetration in the American market is one thirty-fifth that of OpenAI's product, and not growing.
The enterprise picture is more revealing. Enterprise Technology Research found that 48 percent of surveyed firms in March were using or planning to use Anthropic's Claude, more than double the 21 percent from a year earlier. Gemini rose to 40 percent from 27 percent. Grok rose to 7 percent from 4 percent. The companies actually deciding which AI tools their staff will use have made their choice, and Grok is not on the shortlist for most of them.
Several factors are converging. Enterprise buyers care about predictable behaviour, audit trails, and a vendor relationship that will not produce next month's embarrassment. Grok's product history has not made that case. Features intended to differentiate it from competitors, including image-generation tools and AI companions, have at times produced content that drew regulatory attention and made corporate procurement teams nervous. Coding assistants, where most enterprise revenue is being generated right now, are the part of the market where Claude has built dominance. Grok has not seriously contested that ground.
The strangest part of the story sits inside Musk's own corporate empire. In May, SpaceX, also majority-owned by Musk, signed a deal to lease major computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data centre near Memphis to Anthropic. The arrangement is potentially worth billions of dollars annually. Colossus was built to give xAI access to compute for Grok. It is now also a revenue stream for Grok's most successful enterprise competitor. The analyst framing is that SpaceX is repositioning Colossus as an "external computing platform," which is a polite way of saying that the business case for those data centres no longer rests on xAI alone needing them.
There is a pre-IPO logic here that should not be missed. SpaceX is expected to go public later this year. The compute leasing relationships generate revenue that materially improves SpaceX's financial profile heading into that offering. From a corporate finance perspective, Musk is making the right call. From a competitive perspective, his AI company's flagship infrastructure is now financially dependent on his AI company's most successful rival.
Musk has historically been able to recover from product setbacks because his next product matters more than the last one. Tesla's Model 3 redeemed the troubled launch of the Model X. The Falcon 9 redeemed years of Falcon 1 failures. Whether Grok has a comparable inflection point ahead is unclear. The latest model has not produced the kind of capability jump that resets enterprise procurement conversations. xAI's continued ability to attract top researchers has come under question as the competition for AI talent has intensified, particularly with Chinese labs repatriating engineers and US firms paying compensation packages that rival professional athletes.
None of this means xAI is finished. It does mean that the AI market, just two years after most analysts considered it a three-horse race between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google with Musk as a wild card, has begun to look like a two-horse race with Google running hard behind. The wild card is becoming RC Cola. And the data centres that were meant to be xAI's competitive moat are now keeping the lights on by serving its rivals.