Grok 3 AI Launch Effect? Elon Musk's X Hikes Premium+ Subscription

Hours after Elon Musk’s AI company, called xAI, launched the improved Grok 3 AI chatbot, X (formerly Twitter) has announced a hike in its Premium+ subscription, asking users to pay more than double the previous price. The X Premium+ subscription now costs $50 a month, up from $22, which lasted only a few hours after Grok 3’s launch.

The price hike for the X Premium+ subscription — spotted by TechCrunch — appears to be part of Musk’s strategy to boost the company's revenue since Grok’s latest model is exclusive to this tier. As part of the subscription, X users will have access to Grok’s latest capabilities, such as “deep search” and “reasoning.” Those who want Grok 3 to do more will be required to a separate SuperGrok plan, which costs even more.

While the price hike for the US is reflected on all of X’s platforms, the report notes it is inconsistent. When TechCrunch’s reporter tried to sign up for the Premium+ plan, the price appearing on the website was $39.83 per month or $477.95 annually, but the final checkout page changed the annual subscription cost to $395. Meanwhile, X’s support page mentions the monthly subscription cost of $50, but the sign-up page lists a price of $48.40 and the check-out page shows $40 a month.

For what it is worth, the cost is likely more than it was before the launch of Grok 3, which Musk says is the “smartest AI on Earth.” Said to be in development for years, Grok 3 is trained on expanded datasets, including court filings, which xAI said will offer more accurate replies and answers without bias. Musk claimed Grok 3 was built with over ten times of computing power than its predecessor, requiring an infrastructure of around 200,000 GPUs at the company’s Memphis data centre. xAI claims Grok 3 outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek’s R1, and Google’s Gemini 2 Pro on AIME, a benchmark that evaluates a model’s performance based on mathematical questions.