Grok token spikes as Elon Musk teases AI chatbot launch

Grok token shot up 82% on Sunday, likely due to Elon Musk confirming that the Grok 3 chatbot will officially drop on Monday.

At last check, the token was trading at around $0.005579 with a market cap of around $35.5 million.

Grok 3, built under Musk’s tech startup xAI, is expected to make its debut on Monday at 8:00 PM Pacific.

Musk — who oversees xAI along with his other leadership roles at Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) — boasted on X, which he also owns, that Grok 3 is the “smartest AI on Earth.”

What’s at stake?

Grok 3 is entering a high-stakes battleground — and playing catchup. It’s up against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

There’s also China’s DeepSeek, a low-cost Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China-based startup that sent tech stocks plummeting three weeks ago.

Whether Grok 3 benefits from being under the xAI roof remains to be seen. While the Musk-owned startup secured a cool $6 billion from investors, including Nvidia, AMD, and funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it’s still an underdog compared to Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which just rejected Musk’s $97.4 billion buyout offer.

Ties to Musk also come with disadvantages.

Back in November 2023, anonymous and pseudonymous developers launched several GROK-copycat coins just days after Musk announced that xAI was releasing its first AI model to a select group.

These tokens rallied over 30,000% at one point, crypto.news reported at the time.

Since then, Musk’s controversial comments and political endorsements seemingly endeared him to supporters of President Donald Trump, but have reportedly alienated others. Tesla sales have crashed across the globe, and X (formerly Twitter) has seen a massive decline in users ever since Musk acquired it.

Perhaps the narrative is different at xAI. Bloomberg reports that the company is valued at $75 billion and is currently trying to raise $10 billion in venture capital.