SpaceX merger with xAI created a trillion-dollar plus company
Elon Musk merged SpaceX with xAI in February, creating a combined entity that he valued at the time at $1.25 trillion.
Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, has a market cap of about $1.6 trillion, and was previously the main source of his liquid wealth.
In a statement announcing the SpaceX-xAI merger, Musk said the deal was meant to create “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”
But by April, Musk acknowledged that xAI, and the tech underlying its AI chatbot and image generator Grok, “was not built right first time around,” and needed to be “rebuilt from the foundations up.”
Grok was supposed to be xAI’s answer to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, but has remained more of a niche player. Grok drew lawsuits and investigations in the U.S. and Europe after it enabled the widespread creation and sharing of nonconsensualexplicit, deepfakes,which were based on photos and videos of real women and children.
As part of the SpaceX overhaul of xAI’s business and technology, the company struck a deal last month to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. That transaction is expected to move ahead after SpaceX shares begin trading.
SpaceX is also acting as a so-called neocloud, renting out xAI’s compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis to Anthropic.
—Lora Kolodny
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