Joe Wilkins, writing at Futurism:

In the AI world, there are what the tech scholar Kate Crawford has called the “Great Houses of AI.” These are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — giant tech monopolies which happen to also be four of the six top US corporations by market value.

Then there are the lesser houses, the lower fiefdoms squabbling over the crumbs that fall from the big kids’ table. This is where we find Elon Musk’s xAI. Though the world’s richest man has pumped billions of dollars into his pet AI project, it seems all the money in the world can’t buy customers — or even respect, for that matter.

According to the Wall Street Journal, new data shows the growth of xAI’s two-year old chatbot, Grok, has stagnated. Though Musk succeeded in giving Grok a temporary boost after integrating the thing into his social media site X, formerly Twitter, new monthly downloads have fallen from over 20 million in January to just 8.3 million in April.

Here’s a bit from that WSJ piece, written by Georgia Wells:

“In a survey of more than 260,000 U.S. consumers and workers who use AI, the percent of respondents who said they paid for Grok remained mostly flat at 0.174% in the second quarter of 2026 versus 0.173% a year ago, according to research firm Recon Analytics. More than 6% of respondents said they paid for ChatGPT.”

“OpenAl is Coke, Anthropic is Pepsi and Grok is RC Cola,” said Ben Pouladian, an engineer and tech investor based in Los Angeles. “I never really saw people drinking it.”

Pouladian, as the WSJ reports, “drives a Tesla and is active on X.”

The bubble may yet burst, but even if it doesn’t fully pop, I think these smaller companies are clearly in trouble. Between content and environmental issues, I’m all for xAI going first. Other companies could take over its remaining property in Memphis, hopefully being better stewards of the natural resources that make the Mid-South such a desirable location for data centers.

This is exactly why xAI was merged into SpaceX. The former may be bleeding money and losing users, but SpaceX generates enough cash that a lot of the bad can get washed away.