The claim traces to one anonymous sentence in an Axios newsletter, and it tore across Reddit, X, and the news sites in days. It spread because every AI budget is under question right now and a giant dumb number is exactly what a skeptic wanted. To bill $500 million in a month you would have to generate 20 trillion tokens, about 7.7 million every second, nonstop, all month. The real overruns are smaller, named, and already on someone’s invoice.