Elon Musk gave more than $270 million to political groups supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and others on the American right running for office, 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 commission’s numbers, 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 various sycophantic efforts seemingly afforded Musk greater access to Trump, who later rewarded his new buddy 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.
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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