"Don't wait up. The tree's doing fine."
The dream of the money tree drives a lot of AI enthusiasts on X. Set up a clever enough piece of software, walk away, and come back to find it has been quietly earning while you were out. Most of these stories are hype. Alex Finn's may be at least partly real, and he has shown his working.
Finn is one of the most prolific AI explainers on the platform, a seemingly perpetual-motion machine of tutorials who posts to nearly half a million followers. He runs Creator Buddy, a software business he says brings in $300,000 a year, and in April he raised pre-seed funding for a new venture, Henry Intelligent Machines, to build an AI agent that he hopes will spread the gains from AI beyond a small group of people. This week he reported his latest experiment: a business that, he says, his AI agent built while he was out on a date, and which now largely runs itself.
The business is Agent Use Cases, a directory of real things people are doing with AI agents. It lists more than 1,200 examples across tools such as Claude Code, Grok Bot, ChatGPT Agent and Gemini, often with the prompts people used, and sends five of them by email each weekday morning. Finn says he set it up with Grok Bot, the agent service from Elon Musk's AI company, which runs on its own cloud computer and can operate apps and websites much as a person would. His agent built the site and a newsletter, chose sponsorship as the way to make money and put a payment link on the page. A second Grok agent, which he calls Milo, now runs the site, turning readers' suggestions into new features and reporting back on traffic. By Finn's account, the site has drawn 56,000 visitors and 123,000 page views, signed two paying sponsors and made him $1,100 so far.
It is not quite money from nothing. Finn spent hours building and tuning the system, and he has the kind of audience that can send tens of thousands of visitors to a new website almost overnight, an advantage few people share. Two sponsors and $1,100 is a promising start, not yet a business. Still, the idea is the point. Once it is running, the work of finding material, keeping the site fresh and selling its advertising space is done by software rather than by Finn. "I think this is the future of the economy," he wrote. "Everyone's agents building and launching microbusinesses autonomously."
He has shared the whole recipe in great detail, including a step-by-step video showing followers how to set up their own, which he calls "the most important video I've ever put out". And he predicts that a question far more people will be asking a year from now is: "How much agentic income are you making?"
Watch: Alex Finn walks through the business his Grok agent built. Video: Alex Finn.
It is worth a look, if only to see how far one determined person can push today's agents. But this is a story, not financial advice. The money tree, so far, still needs a gardener, and for now that gardener is a human who seems to be thinking about AI around the clock.
Visitor, sponsor and revenue figures are Alex Finn's own and have not been independently verified.