TIL: xAI burn rate

[timelets]

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is burning through $1 billion a month as the cost of building its advanced AI models

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xai-burning-through-1-billion-a-month-as-costs-pile-up

Comments

[timelets]

The value of companies he owns depends on people's perception of his promises and to keep it up, he'd have to deliver an awful lot of business within the next couple of years. We'll see. Usually, drug problems don't go away. Rather, they get worse over time.

Of course, I totally agree that there will be many good models out there. Further, I also see good models that work outside of the usual LLM spaces; they already make a big difference in the field today. But it takes way more than a good core technology to create a highly profitable business that scales to hundreds of millions and even billions of users. Musk has never done that because the "construction" process requires many partners and he's not good at partnering.

In any case, in the next five or so years technology developments are going to be very exciting. There are serious issues with AI, including public trust, that are way bigger than Musk and he's more of a distraction here, rather than the mover and the shaker he used to be with SpaceX and Tesla. The good news is that the emperor still has some clothes on.