Elon Musk has offered a 25 per cent stake in xAI, founded last year to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, to investors backing his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, now known as X. XAI is set to close a new $5 billion round of funding as early as Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter. Its valuation has doubled to $50 billion in just six months. By the end of this week's funding round, xAI will have raised about $11 billion in total for the huge outlay needed to build AI models and one of the world's largest supercomputer clusters. This means that some of Musk's backers, who lost billions of dollars when he acquired Twitter, could profit handsomely from xAI shares as the startup's value has soared. Investors who will benefit from both Musk companies include Fidelity, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Silicon Valley venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). (FT)