Key Takeaways
- Shares of SpaceX climbed nearly 10% following CEO Elon Musk’s declaration that the company “must win in AI”
- The company unveiled Grok 4.6, marketing it as a cost-effective alternative to ChatGPT and Claude
- At $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, Grok 4.6 significantly undercuts competitors
- Artificial Analysis, an AI evaluation company, placed Grok at the “intelligence frontier alongside OpenAI”
- Shares retreated 0.3% to $145.65 during Thursday’s premarket session, maintaining gains above the $135 IPO level
Shares of SpaceX (SPCX) declined 0.3% to $145.65 during Thursday’s premarket trading, pulling back from a nearly 10% surge recorded in the prior session.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SPCX
The stock’s ascent followed CEO Elon Musk’s remarks during an all-hands employee gathering, where he declared: “We must win in AI because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots.”
Backing up the rhetoric, SpaceX unveiled Grok 4.6 on Wednesday. The company positioned the release as a “frontier intelligence” advancement over Grok 4.5, maintaining identical pricing.
Musk characterized the model on X as “Smart, fast & amazing bang for buck.”
Grok 4.6’s Competitive Pricing Strategy
SpaceX is leveraging price as its primary competitive weapon. Grok 4.6 carries a cost structure of $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
By contrast, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 commands $5 per million input and $25 per million output. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol demands $5 per million input and $30 per million output.
The company markets Grok 4.6 as “half the price of other frontier models,” a claim supported by the pricing data.
According to Artificial Analysis, an AI benchmarking organization, the release positions SpaceX AI “back to the intelligence frontier alongside OpenAI, behind only Anthropic.”
Addressing Past Performance Issues
Earlier iterations of Grok drew scrutiny for elevated hallucination frequencies and overconfidence on factual queries when measured against Claude and ChatGPT. Observers pointed out the model’s reluctance to acknowledge knowledge gaps.
The latest release suggests SpaceX has addressed these concerns.
Grok 4.6 is accessible via Grok Build, Cursor, Grok Bot, and the API. Cursor and Grok Build subscribers receive double usage allocations during the initial week.
Cursor, the AI-powered coding editor developed by Anysphere, became part of SpaceX through a $60 billion all-stock acquisition announced June 16. The platform was instrumental in Grok 4.6’s development and deployment.
This transaction came on the heels of the formal combination of SpaceX and Musk’s xAI on February 2, unifying Musk’s artificial intelligence initiatives under a single corporate structure.
During Tuesday’s company-wide meeting, Musk forecasted that AI-generated internet traffic would exceed human internet traffic by a factor of 1,000 within the next five years.
SPCX shares continue to trade above the $135 offering price from the June 12 market debut. Following Wednesday’s Grok 4.6 announcement, the stock reached $142.64 at 11:57 am ET before moderating in overnight trading.
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