Musk tells Tesla staff to switch to Grok — even as he admits it's worse
Elon Musk told Tesla staff in a Friday memo to switch to <em>Grok</em> "when possible" — days after Tesla capped employee AI spending at $200/week with Grok exempted. Musk himself admitted on X that Grok trails Anthropic's Fable 5 in quality, tying the cost-cutting push to a performance trade-off.
Tesla's new $200-per-week cap on employee AI tool spending, in effect since July 6, already carved out an exemption for Grok. Now Musk has gone a step further, directly urging staff to adopt it. According to a memo obtained by Electrek, Musk told employees on Friday to switch to Grok "when possible."
The stated reason is cost. Musk wrote on X that Grok 4.5 runs at roughly $0.13 per task versus $1.57 for Anthropic's Fable 5, adding: "In fairness, Fable is definitely better than Grok 4.5, but most tasks don't require Fable-level capability."
The push follows months of runaway AI spending inside Tesla. The company had gamified token usage with internal leaderboards to drive adoption, and some software engineers were burning through thousands of dollars in tokens per week before the cap was imposed.
Grok isn't popular internally, though — several employees reportedly prefer Anthropic's Fable models. For Tesla shareholders, the episode isn't an earnings signal, but it does raise questions about how Musk balances cost control against tool quality in the AI and autonomy work (FSD, Dojo) that underpins Tesla's investment case.
Summaries are prepared by the Tesla Briefing editorial team and may not capture every nuance of the original reporting. You are solely responsible for your own investment decisions.