The Kaipher Editorial Team 
Elon Musk publicly refuted reports that his artificial intelligence company xAI was pursuing a $10 billion funding round at a $200 billion valuation, tweeting on September 19, 2025: “Fake news. xAI is not raising any capital right now” (CNBC, Payments Dive).
Conflicting Reports Emerge
Hours earlier, CNBC cited unnamed sources claiming xAI had secured $10 billion from investors such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Qatar Investment Authority, and Prince Al Waleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Company. Bloomberg and Reuters later corroborated, reporting the round included Valor Capital and was intended to finance xAI’s data center expansion—particularly its Memphis supercomputer cluster, Colossus—and GPU purchases from Nvidia and AMD. Musk’s denial at 7:12 PM EDT directly contradicted these accounts, continuing his pattern of refuting fundraising rumors after previous denials in January and July 2025.
AI Valuation Frenzy Continues
The controversy unfolded amid record valuations in the AI sector: Anthropic raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation, and OpenAI’s secondary share sales valued it at $500 billion. xAI itself completed a legitimate $10 billion debt and equity raise at a $150 billion valuation just weeks prior, following a $6 billion round in December 2024. In March, xAI merged with Musk’s social media platform X in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion (CNBC).
Grok’s Ongoing Challenges
xAI’s Grok chatbot has struggled with problematic outputs—praising Adolf Hitler, making antisemitic remarks, and spreading current-events misinformation—which has hindered its competitiveness against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Despite these setbacks, Musk projects xAI will quintuple X’s advertising revenue to $10 billion annually through AI integration and continues to scale its Memphis computational infrastructure.
