Elon Musk makes bold play for an unlikely marriage with $3 trillion icon

Elon Musk has been openly hinting at a historic merger in the business world, suggesting that his company xAI should partner with tech giant Apple.

Musk’s company is the corporate face of his popular AI chatbot Grok, which functions similarly to competitors like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot.

Meanwhile, Apple has struggled to bring its own AI programs to consumers, notably delaying improvements to the Siri voice assistant until 2026.

Venture capitalists started openly speculating this month that Musk and Apple make the perfect power couple in the AI world, with xAI bringing Grok to even more people using iPhones through this proposed partnership. 

On the All-In Podcast, investor Gavin Baker called xAI’s Grok4 ‘the best product’ in terms of AI chatbots right now, but added that ‘the best product doesn’t always win in technology.’

‘I think there is solid industrial logic for a partnership. You could have Apple Grok, Safe Grok, whatever you want to call it,’ said Baker, the Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management LP, in a video posted to X on July 19.

Musk quickly replied to the comments, saying ‘Interesting idea.’

The billionaire then added ‘I hope so!’ while responding to another post suggesting that Apple partnering with xAI was a better option than competitors like Anthropic.

Elon Musk has spoken positively about the prospect of forming a partnership between his xAI company and Apple

Apple has continued to have issues creating to functional AI program and has had to delay upgrades to its Siri voice assistant

A partnership between the two companies could integrate xAI’s Grok chatbot into Apple’s devices, such as iPhones, iPads, and Macs, potentially replacing or augmenting Siri.

A relationship between Musk’s AI team and the $3.1 trillion Apple could also lead to smarter, more accurate AI assistants, addressing Apple’s ongoing issues with AI development.

Grok launched in 2023 as Musk’s alternative to other chatbot which had sparked controversy for provided allegedly biased answers and citing information that had been made up.

xAI has said that Grok is “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit,” and the program has generally drawn widespread praise for its quick and accurate answers to prompts. 

Just just weeks ago, however, Grok 4 was engulfed in controversy for repeating far-right hate speech and white nationalist talking points about politics, race, and recent news events.

Multiple users reported on July 8 and July 9 that Grok echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including claims that Jewish people controlled Hollywood, promoted hatred toward White people, and should be imprisoned in camps.

In a post on X, xAI replied to these concerns: ‘We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.’

‘Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,’ the company added.

xAI is currently valued at approximately $200 billion and has 35 million monthly users

Baker added that the deal Musk has been infatuated with would benefit xAI’s reach significantly as well, since OpenAI’s ChatGPT is currently used by nearly 800 million weekly active users, according to Demandsage.

‘There’s been a lot of news about Apple thinking about buying Perplexity or Mistral, but that’s just a Band-Aid. Those companies don’t get Apple what they need,’ Baker said.

To the investor’s point, Perplexity AI is a search-engine-style AI company known for information retrieval and fact-finding tasks. It’s currently valued at $18 billion.

Mistral AI is a French AI firm valued at roughly $6.2 billion that’s focused on easy-to-use, open-source language models. They’ve worked with partners like Cisco to help with tasks like research and automation.

On the other hand, xAI and its Grok chatbot stand out with a current valuation of up to $200 billion and a distribution reaching 35.1 million monthly active users.

Baker explained that ‘xAI and Apple are natural partners,’ especially after OpenAI made a multi-billion-dollar deal to create new devices that use their AI technology without relying on the iPhone.

Venture capitalist Gavin Baker publicly suggested that the two companies would be wise to partner up and create a new AI chatbot business

In May, OpenAI bought former Apple designer Jony Ive’s hardware startup for a reported $6.5 billion.

That deal brought Ive on as the AI company’s new creative head, with the vision of building specialized gadgets that can use generative AI and ChatGPT without needing a smartphone or computer.

While a deal between xAI and Apple is still only speculation, Musk recently turned heads by announcing that xAI was working on a new project called ‘Baby Grok’ which would be a new app designed to provide ‘kid-friendly content.’

Musk has a history of following through on gigantic business deals. The CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla famously purchased Twitter (renaming it X) for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk has also partnered with NASA to spearhead the Commercial Crew Program, which uses SpaceX’s Dragon space capsules to send astronauts to the International Space Station.