Musk-linked contributions to Trump total $270M • The Register

Elon Musk gave greater than $270 million to political teams supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential marketing campaign and others on the American proper, in response to donation figures launched by the Federal Election Fee this week.

The watchdog’s data reveals the Tesla oligarch shelled out round $75 million of his personal money in donations, primarily to his personal Trump-supporting political motion committee, the America PAC.

In all, in response to the Washington Put up’s analysis of the FEC filings, the entire quantity funneled to Trump and different Republicans by the SpaceX supremo is over $270 million, making Musk the biggest donor within the US election.

Notably, the world’s richest man pumped over $20 million into an excellent PAC that paid for adverts arguing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Donald Trump held related views on abortion – the Supreme Courtroom choose felt it was a constitutional proper; the Republican chief stated he would not signal a federal-level ban into legislation, thus leaving it as much as particular person states. Her granddaughter denounced these advertisements on the time, saying they had been “an affront to my late grandmother’s legacy.”

The donations in addition to different efforts seemingly afforded Musk better entry to Trump, who later rewarded his buddy with a job the Starlink tycoon has been craving – doubtlessly gutting cutting the size of the federal government and shaping the very companies and departments that regulate, and award contracts to, the X proprietor’s companies.

Whereas Musk’s political contributions have drawn consideration, his enterprise ventures proceed to develop. His LLM startup xAI has secured one other $6 billion in fairness funding to advance its infrastructure build-out and mannequin improvement.

The funding, detailed in a current SEC filing, would not identify particular financiers, however does present that it was sourced from 97 traders with the smallest contribution weighing in at $77,593. The spherical comes simply six months after the AI startup introduced in $6 billion in Sequence-B funding from a slew of VC companies, bringing its whole raised to roughly $12 billion.

The information comes simply days after it was revealed that xAI will increase its Memphis, Tennessee-based AI supercomputer, dubbed Colossus, to a minimum of 1,000,000 GPUs, up from 100,000 at the moment, or so that is the dream. Contemplating that these GPUs may value $30,000 to $40,000 every, as soon as racked and stacked, xAI goes to want all of the funding it will probably get to assist a build-out of this scale.

With that stated, the machine, which was inbuilt simply 122 days, underscores simply how rapidly the upstart has moved to cement itself as a viable competitor to rival OpenAI.

Within the practically 17 months since Musk based the corporate, xAI has launched plenty of massive language fashions together with its Grok 1.0, 1.5, and a pair of.0 variations and printed the weights for 1.0. These fashions kind the idea for the Grok chatbot accessible to X Premium customers. As of this week, non-Premium subscribers can put as much as 10 prompts to Grok each two hours free of charge.

Early final month, xAI extended one other avenue to compete with OpenAI by opening API entry to its Grok fashions. API entry is a well-liked means for builders to eat proprietary or restricted fashions.

However, as you would possibly count on from a Musk-based startup, xAI and its fashions have not been with out controversy. Again in October, we learned that X would permit third events to coach their AI fashions on social media customers’ information. The implication is that xAI could be the primary in line for the primary information dump.

Musk, in the meantime, stays embroiled in an on-again, off-again authorized grudge match with OpenAI in a bid to cease OpenAI from abandoning its non-profit standing. Since then, Musk has roped Microsoft, a significant OpenAI buyer, backer, and infrastructure supplier into the authorized battle. ®

PS: SpaceX has bagged a Pentagon contract to permit 2,500 Starlink terminals in Ukraine to make use of Starshield, a extra strong and safe type of Starlink, up from 500.