Parmy Olson, Columnist

Elon Musk Is Cashing In on the AI Romance Boom

Grok’s new flirtatious character may be lucrative, but it only offers an illusion of intimacy.

July 18, 2025 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Ani, a virtual anime-style assistant character featured in the Grok 4 AI chatbot.
Photographer: Cheng Xin/Getty Images AsiaPac

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Elon Musk is a no-holds-barred kind of tech billionaire. So too are his new AI companions.

Two characters have been added this week to Grok, the chatbot developed by Musk’s company xAI, including a flirtatious girl with all the hallmarks of a manga character: enormous eyes, thigh-high fishnet stockings and an exaggerated hourglass figure. Musk spent the early hours of Wednesday promoting the character on X, pointing to how Grok was climbing the app store ranks across the world.