Elon Musk has provided critics with plenty of ammo over the years. Yet few CEOs can rival his ability to juggle multiple gargantuan tasks.
Amidst his ongoing political manoeuvring — from campaigning for Donald Trump to architecting a structural overhaul of the US government — Musk has seemingly found time to raise another USD6 billion ($9.3 billion) for his xAI startup. SEC filings released earlier today reveal that Musk secured this funding from 97 investors, who pitched in as little as USD77,000. This is in addition to xAI’s USD6 billion Series B earlier this year.
Like Anthropic and OpenAI — the latter a company Musk co-founded — xAI is developing foundational AI models aimed at achieving artificial general intelligence.
It’s tempting to write off Musk’s efforts. So far, his framing of Grok, xAI’s chatbot, has leaned more towards ideology than innovation. Musk has promoted Grok, which is available on the X social media platform, as a humour-driven repudiation of “woke” competitors like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
