Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, disclosed this week it is looking to raise up to seven figures, but the tech billionaire says the start-up is not raising funds “right now.”
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Tuesday, X.AI Corp. (dba xAI) revealed it is looking to raise $1 billion in an equity offering, with more than $134 million already sold. The document stated the company “has entered into a binding and enforceable agreement for the purchase and sale” of the total $865 million remaining to be sold.
Replying Wednesday to a post on X by Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster regarding the financing, Musk said: “We are not raising money right now.”
Munster’s post had said the fundraising meant Musk wanted to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Citing a source, the New York Post reported that xAI is “raising money at a valuation that will likely be between $4 billion and $10 billion,” adding that the revelation is the first known fundraising round for Musk’s start-up.
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The filing comes a month after Musk announced that xAI’s “Grok” chatbot, which aims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, had entered the beta testing phase.
Musk, who co-founded ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in 2015 and stepped down from its board in 2018, launched xAI to compete with ChatGPT and other Big Tech heavyweights like Google in the AI space. He has been critical of the Big Tech firms’ AI efforts regarding what he calls censorship and said he would launch a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
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Since launching xAI in July, he has staffed the company with personnel from Google’s DeepMind unit, Microsoft and other top AI research firms.
Musk is also the CEO of Tesla and the owner of the X social media platform.
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xAI is distinct from the X social media platform, although the two firms work closely together, and xAI also works with Tesla.
FOX Business’ Eric Revell and Reuters contributed to this report. This story has been updated to add Musk’s comment denying that xAI is currently raising funds.