Musk Ate His Words on Anthropic. Follow the Money

Elon Musk admitted Anthropic is leading the AI race after years of criticism, following a $1.25 billion monthly compute deal between SpaceX and Anthropic. SpaceX, which went public via a record $75 billion IPO, relies on the revenue as its core businesses lose money, with xAI bleeding $6.4 billion in 2025.

On July 9th, Elon Musk unexpectedly admitted that Anthropic is winning the AI race, in response to a post on X suggesting SpaceX could destroy Anthropic . Musk tweeted https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2075278580955685036 , “I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.” Given Musk’s past criticism of Dario Amodei ’s company, his frank declaration that Anthropic is leading the AI race came as a surprise to many. However, a lucrative cloud deal between the two companies speaks volumes. Moreover, Musk is no stranger to hyperbole and contradiction, so how long the lovefest actually lasts is anybody’s guess. A Symbiotic Partnership In the past year and a half, Anthropic has been ascendant, despite https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/hegseth-anthropic-designation-supply-chain-risk-00951183 ardent pushback by competitors and the U.S. government. Among the company’s detractors, Musk frequently dismissed the company, calling https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-eats-words-calling-134604197.html it “misanthropic” and “evil” in February, and saying it would never win the AI race. Despite Musk’s playground taunts, Anthropic continued to gain enterprise customers. Amidst its exponential growth, Anthropic faced a serious scaling issue, needing a much larger compute infrastructure to service its rapidly growing demand. Then, in May 2026, Anthropic announced https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/anthropic-unveils-dreaming-feature-help-its-ai-agents-self-improve-2026-05-06/ it had inked a deal with SpaceX to utilize the full compute capacity of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The announcement, only three months after Musk publicly disparaged Anthropic, provided Anthropic with 300 megawatts/220,000 GPUs of compute capacity, all for the low price of $1.25 billion a month. Since then, SpaceX has gone public via the largest https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-raises-75-billion-in-record-setting-ipo-ahead-of-nasdaq-debut.html IPO in history. While the user on X suggested Musk could nix the compute deal with Anthropic and leave Anthropic in the cold, SpaceX needs revenue, and walking away from $15 billion a year isn’t an option. One Cash Cow, Two Money Pits SpaceX is now a collection of several companies. Most of its business units are unprofitable. The company posted $18.67 billion in revenue year in 2025 , but the number hides a split personality: Starlink threw off $4.4 billion in profit while the rocket business lost $657 million and the newly absorbed xAI/X division bled $6.4 billion , leaving the whole company roughly $4.9 billion in the red , according to its S-1 filing. That gap is only widening, with Q1 2026 alone producing a $4.3 billion loss and capital spending on pace to h https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/spacexs-ipo-charts-reveal-a-company-spending-like-an-ai-giant-chart-of-the-day-120213160.html it https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/spacexs-ipo-charts-reveal-a-company-spending-like-an-ai-giant-chart-of-the-day-120213160.html $40 billion this year , a burn rate SpaceX is covering with its $75 billion IPO and a fresh https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/29/spacex-debt-diversification-equity-bond-investors-analysts.html $25 billion bond sale , while analysts don’t expect positive free cash flow before 2029. That being so, $1.25 billion a month is a meaningful influx of cash for a company that is soon to release its first quarterly report. The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend For the past two years, the rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI has taken center stage in the public’s perception of AI. While Google’s Gemini , xAI, and a handful of open-source Chinese models also compete for market supremacy, OpenAI and Anthropic’s frontier models lead the pack. Musk’s mutual animosity for Sam Altman and OpenAI is well-documented https://mrkt30.com/musk-vs-altman-lawsuit-when-tech-lovers-turn-toxic/ . Musk founded https://mrkt30.com/y-combinator-built-sam-altmans-empire-now-hes-tokenmaxxing-it/ OpenAI with Altman over a decade ago as a nonprofit, which has since then become a for-profit company financed by Microsoft, among others. In the spring, Musk sued OpenAI for breach of contract, seeking $150 billion in damages , but the lawsuit was later thrown out https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/07/11/sam-altman-says-elon-musk-is-obsessed-with-him-in-boast-about-latest-gpt-model/ due to the statute of limitations. When Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI was announced, Musk referred to Altman as “Scam Altman,” on X, saying, “ He takes scamming to a whole new level .” To which Altman replied, “ Homeboy, you’re the one selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters. ” Amid the back-and-forth spat, SpaceXAI released Grok 4.5 while OpenAI released GPT 5.6 and 5.6 Sol , the agentic version of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s latest model is meant to serve as a direct competitor of Anthropic. Musk touts Grok as a cheaper “good enough” option, appealing to a different customer perhaps. Therein lies the strategy behind Musk’s shifting attitude towards Anthropic. SpaceXAI is now a neo-cloud provider, making billions selling compute capacity to Anthropic and others, while also promoting Grok 4.5 based on its competitive pricing. Good While It Lasted How long SpaceX’s relationship with Anthropic will last is unclear. As of now, the dynamic is mutually beneficial. However, Anthropic is actively trying to diversify its compute needs. Besides its deal with SpaceX, Anthropic has committed https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-spacex-compute-deal-colossus/ to spending hundreds of billions on cloud services from Google and Amazon. This tenuous reality could also partially explain Musk’s newfound deference to Anthropic. Or maybe he’s truly impressed with Mythos. For now, SpaceX has compute capacity that Anthropic desperately needs to scale on par with OpenAI. However, the deal with Anthropic can be terminated by either party on short notice. If Anthropic finds adequate cloud services elsewhere and walks, SpaceX loses a significant revenue stream. Then, there’s the question of how much stock one should place on an Elon Musk post on X. While Musk was recently effusive in his praise for Anthropic, that could change next week. Musk is a constant presence on his own platform, griping about “woke” casting https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2026/jul/10/most-fearsome-monster-christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk-stephen-collins-cartoon choices in the Odyssey, while a few years ago belittling cave divers trying to rescue a Thai soccer team. He’s mercurial to say the least, the line between meaningful strategy and emotional immaturity being rather thin. Musk was famously besties with President Donald Trump , injecting eye-popping amounts of money into Trump’s presidential campaign, then, after a very public feud, Musk insinuated https://abcnews.com/US/cover-musk-floods-posts-attacking-trump-epstein/story?id=123836343 that Trump was a pedophile. Now, they’re old chums again. Watch the invoice, not the tweets. This week, he is singing Anthropic’s praises. In February, he called the company evil. Like his relationship with Trump, money has a way of bringing warring parties back together. Musk’s praise for Anthropic reads like a man reading his own balance sheet out loud. SpaceXAI needs the $1.25 billion a month. Anthropic needs the compute. Neither company needs Musk’s opinion of Dario Amodei to stay fixed for longer than the contract does. Anthropic is already spreading its bets across Google and Amazon, a hedge that only makes sense if the SpaceX relationship is temporary by design. Musk has praised and buried business partners before, sometimes in the same week. The tweet calling Anthropic the leader in AI will age exactly as well as the invoice gets paid. Nothing more, nothing less. Author: Tim Tolka https://www.disruptionbanking.com/author/tim-tolka/ , Senior Reporter The editorial team at MRKT3.0 has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article. See Also: OpenAI Needs to Grow 20x in 5 Years. 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