Elon Musk seeking to raise $1 billion for his xAI firm
By Chris Isidore, CNN
New York (CNN) — Elon Musk is seeking to raise $1 billion for his artificial intelligence company xAI.
The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said that it has already raised $135 million of that $1 billion target, and it has a “binding and enforceable agreement” for the purchase of the remaining shares available in this offering. In a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, last month Musk announced that investors in X Corp that he bought last year will own 25% of xAI.
The date of the the first sale of stock in the company was November 29, which was the same day that Musk appeared at the New York Times DealBook Summit. At that appearance he apologized for antisemitic tweets on his personal X account but also told advertisers which have left X because of concerns about antisemitic content on the platform to “go f**k yourself.”
Musk has been among those warning that AI could lead to “civilization destruction.” But in July he announced the creation of xAI, saying that it would “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”
Last month in a public conversation with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that discussed both the dangers and opportunities of AI, Musk said that the technology could lead to a world in which no one needs to work and AI companionship would be one of the highest forms of friendship.
“AI will be a force for good most likely,” Musk said, before cautioning, “but the probability of it going bad is not zero percent.”
Tesla has its own AI efforts as part of its goals of offering self-driving cars and robots in the future. Asked by an analyst why Musk would start a separate AI company that could be seen as competing with those efforts, Musk said it was the only way to attract some of the staff he was seeking.
“There were just some of the world’s best AI engineers and scientists that were willing to join a startup, but they were not willing to join a large, sort of relatively established company like Tesla,” he said on a quarterly earnings call with Tesla investors. “So I was like, ‘Okay, well, better to start up that, that I run this, than they go work somewhere else.’ That’s kind of the genesis of xAI.”
The-CNN-Wire
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