Elon Musk ‘squeezes’ AI spending of Tesla employees

In its announcement on July 3, Tesla said employees will be limited to using AI tools at $200, from the beginning of next week (July 6). However, this regulation does not apply to the Grok model of xAI, the company founded by Elon Musk and now merged into SpaceX.

A source told The Infomationto exceed spending of $200 per month, Tesla employees need special permission. Musk’s company did not comment on this information.

Telegraph believes that Tesla’s introduction of the limit is a turning point from the previous “token maximization” trend, in which employees were evaluated based on the number of tokens they consumed. Token is the basic unit of AI, consisting of text, code or data that an artificial intelligence model processes or generates. Just like streaming video consumes megabytes, asking an AI chatbot to write an essay, debug code, or create an image also costs tokens.

Earlier this year, Musk emphasized on X that applying AI helps the productivity of each Tesla worker reach “sky high” levels. However, what the billionaire expected may not have achieved the expected effect.

Musk is currently investing heavily in AI. However, his Grok model is considered to be lagging behind its competitors, especially in programming capabilities. In March, the billionaire admitted xAI may have to “rebuild from scratch”.

Theo Reutersrecently, many companies have been racing to use AI with the expectation that this technology will increase work efficiency. However, the strategy seems to push costs up as systems increasingly “consume” tokens. In addition, many employees also waste tokens on simple things just to “prove they are using AI”, causing monthly bills to skyrocket.

Some companies are also limiting employees’ use of AI to only critical tasks or encouraging the move towards cheaper systems. Uber, the company that once urged employees to “use AI as much as possible,” recently limited it to $1,500 per month. Praveen Neppalli Naga, chief technology officer at Uber, admitted in April that the company had spent its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months.

Meanwhile, according to The VergeMicrosoft is canceling the majority of licenses for direct use of Claude Code, the programmable AI tool developed by Anthropic, urging employees to switch to GitHub Copilot CLI to prioritize internal products over third parties. Some sources said that the real reason is that the cost of Claude Code increases as the number of users increases. Amazon, Meta, Walmart and Coinbase have all said they will impose spending limits.

In fact, many statistics show that the amount of money spent on AI is sometimes higher than the cost of hiring employees. Last month, Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s Vice President of Deep Learning, said above Axios: “On my team, computing costs are outpacing employee costs.”

American investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that AI agents can drive token consumption to increase 24-fold by 2030, reaching 120 quadrillion tokens per month. As businesses increasingly use AI agents to improve productivity, overall costs could increase sharply even as the price per token decreases.

The reduced use of AI by businesses raises concerns about the potential collapse of the artificial intelligence market in general. However, Elon Musk still has an optimistic view. “There are always temporary declines, even in a rapidly growing economy. But the productivity benefits from AI and robotics are enormous, so the macro trend is overwhelmingly increasing,” the US billionaire wrote on X earlier this week.