Elon Musk has offered a 25% stake in xAI to investors who backed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter (now called X). xAI was founded last year to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. xAI is set to close a new $5 billion funding round as early as Wednesday, doubling its valuation to $50 billion in just six months, according to people familiar with the matter. When the funding closes this week, xAI will have raised a total of about $11 billion to fund the massive spending required to build AI models and one of the world’s largest supercomputer clusters. That means some of Musk’s backers, who lost billions on Twitter, stand to profit handsomely from their xAI stake as the startup’s value soars. Investors who will benefit from Musk’s two 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)