Elon buys $1B of Tesla stock in first open-market purchase since 2020 as xAI cuts 500 employees
Sep 15, 2025
Key Points
- Elon Musk purchases $1 billion of Tesla stock on September 12, his first open-market buy since February 2020, as speculation mounts over a potential xAI-Tesla merger.
- xAI cuts 500 data labelers and shifts to outsourced providers like Scale and Mercor, optimizing costs as the company scales AI infrastructure.
- Grok CodeFast1 dominates OpenRouter with 1.06 trillion tokens generated, dominating the cost-efficient inference segment where production Claude and Gemini traffic routes through proprietary APIs instead.
Summary
Elon Musk purchased $1 billion of Tesla stock on September 12 at an average price of $389.22, his first open-market buy since February 2020. Tesla's market cap has reached $1.128 trillion. The purchase sparked speculation about a potential merger between xAI and Tesla.
At the same time, xAI terminated approximately 500 employees who worked as data labelers. The cuts reflect a shift toward outsourced providers like Scale, Mercor, Labelbox, and Turing, a pattern increasingly common in AI infrastructure as competitive pressures drive cost optimization.
Grok on OpenRouter
Grok CodeFast1 ranks first on OpenRouter with 1.06 trillion tokens generated, well ahead of Claude Sonnet 4 at 343 billion tokens and GPT-5 at 72 billion tokens. The ranking is narrower than the raw numbers suggest. OpenRouter usage skews toward price-sensitive, high-volume inference workloads where cost matters more than frontier reasoning capability. Most production Claude and Gemini deployments route directly through proprietary APIs rather than OpenRouter, so the publicly visible token counts underrepresent their true usage. Anthropic's reported $4 billion annual revenue generates roughly $250 million monthly, yet OpenRouter accounts for only $12 million of that, meaning 95% of their business bypasses the aggregator entirely.
Grok's dominance reflects its positioning in the cost-efficient segment rather than frontier competition. The model also benefits from free availability through Cursor and other integrated platforms, which likely inflates token volume. Still, the performance is bullish for xAI. They have built something competitive at a specific price point that real users prefer for volume-based workloads. Grok users run cheaper inference at lower intelligence per token but compensate through higher token counts, a valid strategy for price-constrained applications.
Strategic questions
Musk's stock purchase and the workforce restructuring leave open whether xAI might eventually merge with Tesla or remain independent. The timing is notable. Tesla has one of the strongest self-driving teams in the industry, and consolidating AI talent under one entity could accelerate both autonomous driving and broader AI product roadmaps. For now, xAI is grinding, building a model that is generating real demand in a competitive but lower-margin market segment.