Elon Musk's XAI is taking its Grok chatbot to Wall Street ahead of the planned IPO of merged parent SpaceX, with Morgan Stanley, Apollo Global Management and Valor Equity Partners now testing the model alongside other large language models, according to a Bloomberg investigation. The push, led by XAI's chief revenue officer John Schulin, is designed to bolster the firm's corporate client roster before public investors are asked to put a price on it — but reporters who broke the story say adoption is moving slowly, and that the chatbot is still falling behind on the workloads that matter most for finance.
Bloomberg's Carmen Arroyo, who first reported the strategy, told Bloomberg Technology that the target list maps closely onto firms with existing Musk-company relationships. "XAI is trying to boost their corporate client roster ahead of the IPO and John Schulin, who's been the chief revenue officer at the company, has been really driving this strategy," Arroyo said. "In order to do that, they've mainly gone to Wall Street clients that have previously worked with Musk companies before. Among them is Apollo, which helped finance XAI's access to chips. It's Morgan Stanley, which is one of the go-to banks that has worked with Musk for years. And it's also Valor Equity, which is a venture capital firm that has backed Musk companies for a long time."
Even with that warm bench of biased buyers, the chatbot is not yet displacing anything. "They're testing Grok and they're using it alongside other AI models," Arroyo said. "But this is happening while Anthropic and OpenAI are really trying to fight for the same piece of the pie. So the adoption is going very slowly." Crucially, Arroyo's reporting is that XAI's enterprise customers are not deploying Grok for everyday desk work. "Actually in your reporting they're not using it necessarily for work," her interviewer noted, and she agreed: "On desk work in those firms they're trying to adopt it and use it along other AI models. But the chatbot has been falling behind on coding and on financial implementation, which is why XAI is trying to like really ramp that effort up."
That gap is the precise piece XAI is now trying to close internally. "They've been trying to move more stuff internally to work on training Grok for financial modeling and boosting also like the sales team," Arroyo said. "So they're trying to really prepare the chatbot for that use case, but it's not really being ready for it yet."
The reporting also flagged a leadership shift inside the revenue team that had been driving the Wall Street strategy. "John Schulin stepping back as chief revenue officer — of course a partner at Valor — now an adviser," Arroyo said, confirming an internal move that surfaced as part of the IPO preparation.
The push lands at an awkward moment for the AI franchise. XAI is now part of SpaceX after Musk folded the chatbot business into the rocket company earlier this year, and the SpaceX IPO that public investors are being walked towards will, by necessity, ask them to price Grok against the very models it is losing to in pilot installations. Two of XAI's largest test clients — Morgan Stanley and Apollo — are exactly the kind of marquee customer references underwriters will want stamped on the prospectus, and Bloomberg's reporting suggests those stamps are not yet there.
Wall Street's appetite for new AI vendors is also not unlimited. Anthropic and OpenAI have spent the last year locking in enterprise commitments through reseller deals with the major cloud platforms and direct seats on trading-floor pilots; XAI is arriving late to a market where the incumbents have already wired themselves into compliance, security review and procurement processes. Arroyo's reporting frames the XAI effort as a "really ramp up" exercise rather than a parity claim, and Schulin's transition out of the operating role suggests the firm itself sees the next phase as one that needs different leadership.
For the fintech read, the story is less about who wins the chatbot war and more about how IPO bankers will model a SpaceX-XAI listing that depends, at least in part, on convincing the Street that Grok will eventually be everywhere on the Street.