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xAI

AI research division

Appears in 8 stories

Stories

SpaceX buys AI coding startup Cursor in $60 billion stock deal

Money Moves

Intended beneficiary; the unit Cursor is meant to strengthen

SpaceX went public on June 12 in the largest stock-market debut ever. Five days later, it agreed to spend $60 billion on Cursor, an AI coding tool barely three years old.

Updated 2 hours ago

X builds toward a Western super app, one standalone product at a time

New Capabilities

Parent company of X following March 2025 merger

Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter in October 2022, telling investors it was 'an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.' Three and a half years later, that app is still taking shape—haltingly.

Updated May 31

The AI funding supercycle

Money Moves

Dissolved as independent entity May 2026; absorbed into SpaceX as SpaceXAI division

On May 28, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, passing OpenAI to become the world's most valuable private AI company. The round disclosed annualized revenue at $47 billion, up from $44 billion three weeks earlier. Anthropic is targeting an IPO this autumn.

Updated May 29

Musk merges SpaceX and xAI in record-breaking deal

Money Moves

Dissolved as standalone entity; products under SpaceXAI division; all 11 original co-founders departed; 50+ researchers gone; NAACP Clean Air Act lawsuit pending over Colossus 2 gas turbines

In February 2026, SpaceX bought xAI for $250 billion, the largest acquisition in corporate history. By mid-May, all 11 original xAI co-founders had left, and more than 50 SpaceXAI researchers and engineers had departed for Meta and Thinking Machines Lab.

Updated May 26

X platform faces multi-front regulatory assault

Rule Changes

Acquired by SpaceX; subject of multiple investigations

French prosecutors raided X's Paris offices on February 3, 2026, and summoned Elon Musk for questioning—a first for a major social media platform owner in Europe. What began as a complaint about biased algorithms in January 2025 has expanded into a criminal probe. The investigation covers child sexual abuse material, sexually explicit deepfakes, Holocaust denial, and X's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

Updated May 26

Grok's deepfake crisis tests global platform regulation

Rule Changes

Under investigation in multiple jurisdictions

For decades, Western democracies debated whether to regulate social media platforms. The UK just stopped debating—and now the United States is joining the fight. After Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, generated an estimated one nonconsensual sexualized image per minute posted directly to X, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic took action. On January 15, X announced it will geoblock Grok from creating images of people in revealing clothing in jurisdictions where it's illegal. This came one day after California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened an investigation into xAI, calling the platform 'a breeding ground for predators.' Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Parliament that X is 'acting to ensure full compliance,' having removed over 600 accounts and censored 3,500 content items. The alternative: fines up to 10% of global revenue or a complete platform ban.

Updated May 21

Grok's global reckoning: the first AI tool banned for mass deepfake generation

Rule Changes

Facing multi-jurisdiction regulatory pressure

AI image generators have been creating non-consensual intimate imagery since 2017. No government had blocked one until January 10, 2026, when Indonesia became the first to shut off access to xAI's Grok.

Updated May 20

AI data centers are rebuilding – and stress-testing – the U.S. power grid

Built World

Building $20 billion, 2-gigawatt data center campus in Mississippi

Since late 2022, U.S. regulators and utilities have warned that AI-optimized data centers could reshape national power demand, ending an era of flat electricity consumption and forcing rapid buildout of generation and transmission. By early 2026, those warnings have crystallized into concrete challenges. PJM Interconnection's December 2025 capacity auction hit the $333.44/MW-day price cap and failed to meet reliability requirements for the first time in its history. Data centers accounted for $6.5 billion—or 40%—of the auction's $16.4 billion in costs.

Updated May 10