Elon Musk gave more than $270 million to political groups supporting Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and others on the American right, according to donation figures released by the Federal Election Commission this week.
The watchdog's data shows the Tesla oligarch shelled out around $75 million of his own cash in donations, primarily to his own Trump-supporting political action committee, the America PAC.
In all, according to the Washington Post's analysis of the FEC filings, the total amount funneled to Trump and other Republicans by the SpaceX supremo is over $270 million, making Musk the largest donor in the US election.
Notably, the world's richest man pumped over $20 million into a super PAC that paid for adverts arguing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Donald Trump held similar views on abortion – the Supreme Court judge felt it was a constitutional right; the Republican leader said he wouldn't sign a federal-level ban into law, thus leaving it up to individual states. Her granddaughter denounced these ads at the time, saying they were "an affront to my late grandmother’s legacy."
The donations as well as other efforts seemingly afforded Musk greater access to Trump, who later rewarded his buddy with a job the Starlink tycoon has been craving - potentially gutting cutting the size of the government and shaping the very agencies and departments that regulate, and award contracts to, the X owner's corporations.
While Musk's political contributions have drawn attention, his business ventures continue to grow. His LLM startup xAI has secured another $6 billion in equity funding to advance its infrastructure build-out and model development.
The funding, detailed in a recent SEC filing, doesn't name specific financiers, but does show that it was sourced from 97 investors with the smallest contribution weighing in at $77,593. The round comes just six months after the AI startup brought in $6 billion in Series-B funding from a slew of VC firms, bringing its total raised to roughly $12 billion.
The news comes just days after it was revealed that xAI will expand its Memphis, Tennessee-based AI supercomputer, dubbed Colossus, to at least a million GPUs, up from 100,000 today, or so that's the dream. Considering that these GPUs could cost $30,000 to $40,000 each, once racked and stacked, xAI is going to need all the funding it can get to support a build-out of this scale.
With that said, the machine, which was built in just 122 days, underscores just how quickly the upstart has moved to cement itself as a viable competitor to rival OpenAI.
In the nearly 17 months since Musk founded the company, xAI has released a number of large language models including its Grok 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 versions and published the weights for 1.0. These models form the basis for the Grok chatbot available to X Premium users. As of this week, non-Premium subscribers can put up to 10 prompts to Grok every two hours for free.
Early last month, xAI extended another avenue to compete with OpenAI by opening API access to its Grok models. API access is a popular means for developers to consume proprietary or restricted models.
But, as you might expect from a Musk-based startup, xAI and its models haven't been without controversy. Back in October, we learned that X would allow third parties to train their AI models on social media users' data. The implication is that xAI would be the first in line for the first data dump.
Musk, meanwhile, remains embroiled in an on-again, off-again legal grudge match with OpenAI in a bid to stop OpenAI from abandoning its non-profit status. Since then, Musk has roped Microsoft, a major OpenAI customer, backer, and infrastructure provider into the legal fight. ®
PS: SpaceX has bagged a Pentagon contract to allow 2,500 Starlink terminals in Ukraine to use Starshield, a more robust and secure form of Starlink, up from 500.