Grok Bot users ran out of a week’s usage overnight, and Elon Musk says the agent was costing too much

Paying Grok Bot users found their weekly allowance for SpaceXSI’s AI agent used up overnight on Sunday, days before it was due to reset. When one asked Elon Musk for a reset, he replied that the cost of serving Grok Bot “was unsustainably high relative to revenue”. He didn’t say whether limits had been cut, whether the jump was a fault, or whether anyone would get their usage back.

In a thread on Cursor’s forum with more than 80 replies by Sunday evening, users described the weekly usage meter in the Grok Bot app leaping towards 100% with no activity to explain it. One, who went from about 52% on Saturday night to 100% on Sunday morning, wrote that it had “completely halted a major update to my paid SaaS platform”.

What Musk said

The question came from Doge Norway, an X account with about 44,000 followers. It had posted at 15:52 UTC that its Grok Bot usage was at 100% with four days to go, adding: “Normally I don’t even reach 100%.” At 20:11 UTC it asked Musk: “Any chance for a Grok Bot reset, @elonmusk? Lots of people say their usage ran out really fast this week.” He answered 23 minutes later:

@DogecoinNorway The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026

He wrote “was”, not “is”, and didn’t say what, if anything, had changed. It drew more than 400 replies within an hour.

Cursor says the jump “shouldn’t happen”

A Cursor staff member answering the forum thread, which covers Grok Bot because usage on legacy Cursor and SuperGrok plans is metered on Cursor accounts, treated it as a fault:

A sharp jump in weekly Grok Bot usage without matching activity shouldn’t happen, and it isn’t related to your settings or routines.

deanrie, Cursor staff, on the Cursor forum

The staff member put the spike at around 04:10 to 04:20 UTC on November 1, and said counters stayed inflated after an incident on SpaceXSI’s status page was marked resolved. That incident, a “service degradation affecting our billing and usage dashboard”, was opened at 05:38 UTC and closed at 10:53 UTC with no explanation. A later post said Ultra, Pro+, legacy Pro and legacy SuperGrok Heavy plans were all affected, but added: “I don’t want to guess about the cause before the team replies.”

Neither SpaceXSI nor Cursor has said publicly whether Sunday’s jump was a metering fault, a change to how Grok Bot usage is counted, or both.

Weeks after “the fastest growth” Musk had seen

Less than two weeks ago Grok Bot was the star of SpaceX’s results. On the October 20 earnings call, Musk said “I’ve never seen anything grow this fast”, adding that “the usage of Grok Bot grows over time per user. It does not decline.” He predicted Grok Bot “may end up being what uses most of our Super Intelligence compute”. President Gwynne Shotwell said it had 800,000 paid weekly users earlier that month, more than double the month before.

That compute has other buyers. Finance chief Bret Johnsen told analysts SpaceX would “continuously evaluate the highest-margin usage for our compute assets”, weighing cloud deals against “serving inference for our own SI products”. Renting out computing power did most of the work in the $7.56 billion its AI business took in that quarter.

Grok Bot, meanwhile, is sold cheaply. Since October 12 it has come with the $30-a-month Premium tier of The X Subscription, drawing on one weekly pool shared with Grok and Cursor. Musk said on October 7 that it would use Anthropic’s Claude when Claude was better, and SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot FAQ says routing a task to Claude Opus 5.5 “doesn’t change what it costs you per token”.

What Grok Bot users can do

• Cap paid usage. Cursor’s staff member advised setting a limit so the inflated counter doesn’t roll into paid on-demand usage. On a legacy Cursor plan, open Settings, then Usage & Billing, then On-demand monthly limit; on The X Subscription, leave Auto Top-up off or set a monthly cap at grok.com/dashboard/billing, according to the FAQ.
• Ask for a recalculation. Cursor says only SpaceXSI’s support team ([email protected]) can recalculate an account’s usage. Attach your usage CSV and the time of the jump.

OpenAI went the other way on October 29: it cancelled a planned cut to ChatGPT Pro 200 limits and doubled usage on its other Pro tiers.

Why it matters

AI bosses rarely admit that a flagship product costs too much to serve for what it earns, and Musk did it while paying users were locked out mid-week. Agents that work around the clock burn far more compute than chat, and how AI firms cover those costs is one of the big open questions about the industry. Until SpaceXSI says whether Sunday’s jump was a bug or a new limit, Grok Bot users can’t tell how much they are getting for their money.

Sources: Elon Musk on X; Doge Norway on X; Cursor forum: Grok Bot weekly usage meter flips between 77% and 100%; SpaceXSI status: Service Degradation, Billing and Usage Dashboard; SpaceX third quarter 2026 webcast transcript; SpaceXSI: Grok Bot FAQ; SpaceXSI: Grok Bot on The X Subscription