
Load up on coding: Why Elon Musk's $60 billion pre-IPO deal for SpaceX shows foresight
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.To understand why, look at OpenAI. Its success in domination of the consumer market for chatbots has become a poisoned chalice, because powering frontier models for roughly a billion active users requires enormous and expensive computing power.
About 75% of OpenAI’s $2 billion monthly revenue comes from consumers, many of whom pay about $20 a month for ChatGPT. But those consumers could also be costing Sam Altman’s company somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion thanks to the rising price of running larger and more complex AI models.
OpenAI expects to burn through $115 billion of cash by 2029.Musk is facing similar costs for Grok. Its developer xAI, which Musk merged recently with SpaceX, hasn’t disclosed the chatbot’s user numbers, instead combining them with X [formerly Twitter] to claim “600 million” monthly visitors.
Even if Grok alone had 200 million regular users, based on recurrent running fees and a rough estimate that could be costing the company close to $300 million a month. The solution has been in plain sight for some time: business customers, which AI labs can charge more.
ChatGPT Enterprise, for instance, costs roughly $45 to $75 per user monthly with a minimum 150 accounts, meaning a single small or medium-sized company is worth something closer to $100,000 in annual revenue versus $240 for a single consumer.No wonder OpenAI has shifted to aggressively targeting enterprise customers to win back some ground from Anthropic in that market. The latter’s revenue run-rate—a projection of yearly sales based on short-term data—more than doubled between February and April to $30 billion, driven heavily by Claude Code, which is popular with corporate tech teams.SpaceX, through
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