Elon Musk’s xAI firm valued at $24 billion as investors pledge more money
CNN
The AI firm founded by Elon Musk has raised another $6 billion from investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and a Saudi prince, boosting its valuation to $24 billion.
The AI firm founded by Elon Musk has raised another $6 billion from investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and a Saudi prince, boosting its valuation to $24 billion. Investors providing the second-round funding included Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, xAI announced in a blog post on Sunday. Musk, who founded xAI in July last year, wrote Monday on X that there would be “more to announce in the coming weeks,” and that the startup had a valuation of $18 billion before receiving the new funding. xAI said in its post that the new money would be used to take the firm’s “first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.” The funding sets the company up as a potential rival to OpenAI, the AI research group behind the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT. Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, but stepped down as chairman six years ago partly over disagreements about the company’s direction. In November, xAI announced that it was developing an AI-powered chatbot called “Grok” for some paying users of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter which Musk also owns. The billionaire said in a post on X at the time that Grok was being trained by having “real-time access” to information on the site.
The US has completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil since the US attached Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this month, according to an administration official.
President Donald Trump enacted a new 25% tariff on “certain advanced computing chips” on Wednesday, according to a White House fact sheet. That includes Nvidia’s H200 chip and AMD’s MI325X. However, chips imported to support building up the US technological supply chain would be exempt.
Verizon said some of its wireless services were down Wednesday, leaving many customers without access to voice and data services.
YouTube will now let parents limit the amount of time their teens can spend scrolling through its short-form video feature, Shorts, or block them all together.
Last month, Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson penned a first-person piece about her long year as “the federal government whisperer,” receiving tips from hundreds of federal workers. On Wednesday, the FBI searched her home, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.
Price hikes picked up speed for US-based businesses toward the end of last year, a potential signal that inflation has yet to peak and prices could soon rise faster for consumers.
Trump is threatening to take “strong action” against Iran just after capturing the leader of Venezuela. His administration is criminally investigating the chair of the Federal Reserve and is taking a scorched-earth approach on affordability by threatening key profit drivers for banks and institutional investors.
Perhaps no data point better encapsulates the American economy right now than this nugget from Delta’s quarterly earnings:
China recorded the world’s biggest ever trade surplus in 2025, as well as a 20% jump from 2024, capping off a year in which the world’s largest manufacturer defied US trade pressure by ramping up exports to other global markets.
Saks Global, the parent company of luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue, filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday, according to court documents filed in US Bankruptcy Court in Houston, Texas.
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Microsoft says it will ask to pay higher electricity bills in areas where it’s building data centers, in an effort to prevent electricity prices for local residents from rising in those areas. The move is part of a broader plan to address rising prices and other concerns sparked by the tech industry’s massive buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure across the United States.
US consumer prices rose 2.7% annually in December, closing out a year that saw slight progress on inflation but continued affordability concerns for many Americans.