Elon Musk, the billionaire founding father of SpaceX, on Friday denied a media report from earlier this week that stated buyers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been planning to spend money on 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 spend money on a multi-billion greenback funding spherical for SpaceX, the Information had reported on Wednesday, citing folks aware of the discussions.
Musk tweeted “not true” responding to the report.
The funding spherical is predicted 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 response to enterprise capital agency Space Capital.
Meanwhile, Amazon announced final week that it plans to launch its first Internet satellites to area within the first half of 2024 and provide preliminary business exams shortly after, because it prepares to vie with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to supply broadband Internet globally.
Amazon’s satellite tv for pc Internet unit, Project Kuiper, will start mass-producing the satellites later this yr, the corporate stated. Those would be the first of over 3,000 satellites the expertise big plans to launch in low-Earth orbit within the subsequent few years.
“We’ll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024,” Dave Limp, senior vp of Amazon gadgets, stated 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 hundreds of thousands of gadgets from its shopper electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned area firm whose Starlink community already has roughly 4,000 satellites in area.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
