Two private companies of Elon Musk, SpaceX and xAI, will soon dramatically increase their capitalization due to new investments. A space shuttle maker is planning a major stock sale, and an artificial intelligence startup has completed another $5 billion round of funding. Investors, in turn, are rushing to support the expanding business interests of the world’s richest man.
The increased interest in Musk’s companies from investors is not surprising – the businessman made a significant contribution to the election campaign of US President-elect Donald Trump and became his key confidant. On November 12, Trump tapped Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech specialist and former presidential candidate, to head the new Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE). Trump is looking to them for “advice and guidance from outside the government” and ways to “dismantle” the bureaucracy.
SpaceX, the largest privately held company in the United States, is preparing to sell some of its shares in December for about $135 a share. This would increase the company’s market value from $210 billion to more than $250 billion. There is no doubt that SpaceX will benefit from Musk’s proximity to Trump. In addition to long-standing ambitions to send a mission to Mars, Musk wants to add 6,000 low-Earth orbit devices to his Starlink satellite constellation, something that a number of US regulators have previously opposed.
Meanwhile, Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has attracted $5 billion in funding with a capitalization of $45 billion, almost double what it was a few months ago. Analysts expect the next round of funding to occur in the first quarter of 2025, which will increase xAI’s capitalization to $75 billion. The current fundraising has occurred at breakneck speed, despite the fact that negotiations with investors began only last month. Sources at xAI said the deal has been “fully allocated,” although it won’t formally close until the end of the month. Only investors who had already supported the startup in the previous fundraising round were able to take part in the deal.
XAI is currently working on Project Colossus, which will include a huge cluster of 100,000 GPUs used to train and run AI tools. Colossus will be one of the largest supercomputers in the world. xAI’s artificial intelligence developments will play a critical role in Musk’s other ventures, including X, Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.
Musk’s closeness to Trump has also boosted electric car maker Tesla’s stock price, with the company’s market value up nearly 30% since the Nov. 5 election.
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