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Billionaire Elon Musk denied a report that his artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, had received commitments to be halfway to its $1 billion investment goal.
“This is simply not correct,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in response to a user's post on the platform quoting a Bloomberg News report.
Bloomberg had reported that xAI was discussing a valuation of $15 billion to $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, although those terms could change in the coming weeks.
According to the report, Musk and investors plan to finalize investment terms in the next few weeks and some parties are exploring whether they can get computing power in addition to, or in some cases instead of, xAI shares.
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Billionaire Elon Musk dismissed reports that his AI startup xAI is halfway to a $1 billion fundraising goal. (Hakan Nural/Anadolu Agency via / Getty Images)
In December, xAI filed a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicating that the company was looking to raise $1 billion through a stock offering and over $134 million had already been sold.
That document indicated that xAi has entered into “a binding and enforceable agreement to purchase and sell” the approximately $865 million remaining to be sold.
Musk also dismissed that report, writing in response to a post about fundraising that xAI wanted to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic: “We are not raising money at this time.”
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xAI was founded by Musk in July and announced the Grok chatbot in November. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via / Getty Images)
In July, Musk launched xAI in response to AI initiatives from major tech companies, which he criticized for excessive censorship and inadequate security measures. Musk co-founded ChatGPT maker OpenAI in 2015 and stepped down from its board in 2018. At the time, he explained that he wanted to create the most truth-seeking AI possible that would try to understand the nature of the universe.
xAI is different from the social media platform X, although the two companies work closely together and xAI also works with Tesla.
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xAI's Grok chatbot is available to X Premium+ subscribers. (Photo illustration by Costfoto/NurPhoto via / Getty Images)
xAI announced in November that it had launched a preview version of its chatbot Grok, designed to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. The company said Grok is “modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so it's designed to answer almost anything and, even more difficult, even suggest what questions you should ask!” Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of humor and has a rebellious streak.” so please don't use it if you hate humor!”
The company made the Grok chatbot available to X Premium+ subscribers in the US in December. It later rolled out the AI tool's availability to subscribers living in Australia, Canada and India, as well as more than a dozen other countries.
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Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and close friend of Musk, said in September that xAI had signed a contract to train its AI model on Oracle's cloud.
FOX Business's Breck Dumas and Portal contributed to this report.