Another leading AI company acquired its brand matching .com domain name. This time, it is Grok.com, which was acquired by xAI for its Grok chatbot. The acquisition was first reported and shared on X late in the day yesterday:
💬 Looks like Grok․com now has been acquired by xAi (Elon Musk).
⏩ Domain forwards to x․ai pic.twitter.com/p49Mu3CLEU
— ARIYAS (@domainretail) December 23, 2024
Whois records are currently “redacted for privacy.” However, an historic Whois record from DomainTools show the domain name was briefly registered to xAI at GoDaddy in early December:
Prior to that, the domain name was registered under Whois privacy at Tucows.
When I saw the post about Grok.com, I reached out to Andrew Rosener of Media Options to see if he brokered the deal. I understand that Andrew has worked with Elon Musk in the past to assist with domain name acquisitions, including the acquisition of X.com from PayPal and Starlink.com. Andrew told me he could not comment.
Whether Media Options helped with the Grok.com domain acquisition remains to be seen, but it’s another example of a leading AI company acquiring its brand match .com domain name. Anthropic appears to have acquired Claude.com, Perplexity acquired Perplexity.com, and OpenAI acquired Chat.com and ChatGPT.com among other great assets.
I’ve said before, ” All roads lead to dotcom”.
2025 will be the year of the upgrade from .ai to dotcom.
With .ai prices reaching six figures, the strongest Ai companies will prioritize budgeting for the smart dotcom investment.
Dotcom is king
Yes, I noticed Grok .com was purchased by XAI maybe 2 weeks ago.
I believe Musk can afford whatever the price was — his networth has increased by 240 billion usd since Trump won the election — well, that was Friday. Maybe it’s a 300 billion usd increase by now. LOL
(he won’t need by Grok domains now –)
He will be first trillionaire in 2026,
followed by:
Bezos
Zuck
maybe Saylor?
maybe Larry Fink?
maybe Jared and Ivanka?
Gilded Age II is already here.
my, not by
Ai is a great distribution mechanism and what will never go away from Ai is being closes to your users and customers. Without the exact match .com , you will not fully gain this critical piece owning the customer journey.