stop the manufacture<\/a> of two car models in favour of producing robots – one of the most significant pivots the company has made.<\/p>\nTesla moved forward with the xAI investment despite objections from some shareholders, who had questioned the decision to divert resources to another Musk firm. In a vote last year, abstentions and votes against the idea outnumbered those who approved.<\/p>\n
SpaceX is also reported to be working on plans to list its shares for public trading.<\/p>\n
Emily Zheng, a senior analyst at Pitchbook, said the deal for xAI has all the markings of a company preparing for a public listing. <\/p>\n
“The sheer cost of compute, infrastructure, and energy is why we are seeing many of venture’s most valuable startups like SpaceX prepare to go public this year,” Zheng said. <\/p>\n
“Consolidating these companies ahead of an IPO allows SpaceX to present a differentiated, capital-efficient growth narrative to public investors.”<\/p>\n
IPO stands for Initial Public Offering, and this is when a private company first sells its stock to the public on a stock exchange.<\/p>\n
In the SpaceX memo announcing the xAI merger, Musk said he thought space would provide the solution to the energy needs faced by AI firms. <\/p>\n
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” he wrote.<\/p>\n
He said launching AI satellites from Earth would be the “immediate focus”, but added that the deal would also help advance his bigger ambitions. <\/p>\n
“The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the Universe,” he wrote.<\/p>\n
Neuralink and The Boring Company now appear to be the only two smaller Musk companies that have not been brought under one of his larger operations.<\/p>\n
xAI started out as a segment of X, formerly known as Twitter, after Musk acquired the social media platform in 2022, using its access to real-time text and information as AI training data.<\/p>\n
By spring of 2025, xAI was independently incorporated and valued more highly by investors than X. <\/p>\n
The AI company acquired the social media platform in an all-stock deal, with Musk saying the merger would “combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent”.<\/p>\n
xAI’s main product is Grok, which has come under scrutiny several times over its AI image generation feature.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, the European Commission and UK watchdog Ofcom both launched investigations into X over concerns Grok was used to create sexualised images. <\/p>\n
xAI said in January it had imposed restrictions on Grok users that limit image editing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, also announced it had invested $2bn into xAI. Musk told Tesla…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-405280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}