Elon Muskthe billionaire founder of SpaceXon Friday denied a media report earlier this week that investors from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were planning to invest in the company in a multi-billion dollar financing round.
A unit of the Saudi Arabian Investment Fund and an Abu Dhabi-based company plan to invest in a multi-billion-dollar funding round for SpaceX, the information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
Musk tweeted “huh” in response to the report.
The round of funding is expected to value the missile maker at around US$140 billion (around Rs.11,54,384 million), the report added.
According to venture capital firm Space Capital, SpaceX raised US$2 billion (about Rs.16,491 crore) in 2022 and US$2.6 billion (about Rs.21,438 crore) in 2020.
Meanwhile Amazon announced last week that it plans to launch its first internet satellites in the first half of 2024 and offer first commercial tests shortly thereafter as it prepares to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet worldwide .
Amazon’s satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass production of the satellites later this year, the company said. These will be the first of over 3,000 satellites that the tech giant plans to launch into low Earth orbit over the next few years.
“We will definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024,” said Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon Devices, at a conference in Washington.
With plans to pump more than $10 billion (around Rs. 82,400 billion) into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience in manufacturing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an advantage over rival SpaceX, the Space company owned by Musk, whose Starlink network already has around 4,000 satellites in space.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
