Elon Musk, the billionaire founding father of SpaceX, on Friday denied a media report from earlier this week that mentioned traders from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been planning to put money into a multi-billion greenback funding spherical within the firm.
A unit of Saudi Arabia’s funding fund and an Abu Dhabi-based firm are planning to put money into a multi-billion greenback funding spherical for SpaceX, the data was reported on Wednesday, citing folks acquainted with the discussions.
Musk tweeted “not true” responding to the report.
The funding spherical is anticipated to worth the rocket maker at about $140 billion (roughly Rs. 11,54,384 crore), the report added.
SpaceX raised $2 billion (roughly Rs. 16,491 crore) in 2022 and $2.6 billion (roughly Rs. 21,438 crore) in 2020, in line with enterprise capital agency Area Capital.
In the meantime, Amazon introduced final week that it plans to launch its first Web satellites to house within the first half of 2024 and provide preliminary business checks shortly after, because it prepares to vie with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to offer broadband Web globally.
Amazon’s satellite tv for pc Web unit, Undertaking Kuiper, will start mass-producing the satellites later this yr, the corporate mentioned. These would be the first of over 3,000 satellites the know-how large plans to launch into low-Earth orbit within the subsequent few years.
“We’ll positively be beta testing with business prospects in 2024,” Dave Limp, senior vp of Amazon units, mentioned at a convention in Washington.
With plans to pump greater than $10 billion (roughly Rs. 82,400 crore) into the Kuiper community, Amazon sees its expertise producing tens of millions of units from its client electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned house firm whose Starlink community already has roughly 4,000 satellites in house.
© Thomson Reuters 2023