Musk will attend the Cannes International Festival of Creativity this week, aiming to reassure advertising groups and global brands about the future of X.
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Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk posted an informal poll on social network X asking whether his publicly traded automaker should invest $5 billion in his latest startup, xAI.
Specifically, he asked: “Should Tesla invest $5B in @xAI, assuming the valuation is set by a few credible outside investors? (Board approval and shareholder vote required, so this is just To test the waters)”
The billionaire executive — who also runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, X Corp. and now xAI — shared this shortly after Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call Tuesday night opinion poll.
Tesla Report Second quarter financial report The company missed analysts’ forecasts for the fourth consecutive quarter and revenue at its core auto business also fell. However, the company’s energy storage sales have soared and focused investors’ attention on a future filled with robotaxis and humanoid robots it is developing.
Tesla’s stock price fell more than 7% in after-hours trading after the company released its second-quarter earnings report.
Musk’s companies often collaborate and pay each other, but not in amounts exceeding billions of dollars. For example, as CNBC previously reported, SpaceX has acquired advertising campaign Promotes its Starlink satellite internet service on X (formerly Twitter). The Boring Company is under construction tunnel At Tesla’s Texas factory.
During an earnings call on Tuesday, shareholders asked Musk whether Tesla might invest in xAI and integrate xAI’s software, called Grok, into its vehicles.
Musk responded: “Tesla has learned a lot from xAI. This is actually very helpful for advancing full self-driving and building new Tesla data centers. Regarding investing in xAI, I think we need to have a shareholder but If shareholders agree, of course I will support it.
The $5 billion figure didn’t emerge until Musk released the poll results after the call.
He did not elaborate on how Grok would “advance” the company’s driving technology.
xAI was established in March last year and was first publicly discussed by Musk in July 2023. It develops large-scale language models and artificial intelligence software products, aiming to compete with products from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta and other companies.
For example, AI chatbots can be used to generate story ideas, transcripts, lists of action items based on meeting notes, create or edit code for computer programmers, or translate ideas from English to another language.
XAI’s first product, Grok, is far from the usefulness of today’s leading chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing and Anthropic’s Claude. Musk calls Grok a politically incorrect and smart alternative to these existing products.
Musk and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for more information Tuesday, including why the CEO initially did not choose to incubate xAI at Tesla.
According to a company blog post on May 27, xAI previously raised US$6 billion in Series B financing and obtained a post-money valuation of US$24 billion.
