• Elon Musk's AI startup xAI has been valued at a reported $50 billion, 16 months after its founding.
• It hit the milestone nearly nine years faster than it took rival OpenAI to cross the threshold.
• The funding round widens the valuation gap between xAI and its rivals like Anthropic and Perplexity.

Elon Musk has a certified rocketship in his hands — and, no, we're not talking about SpaceX.

One of his other companies, his artificial-intelligence startup xAI, has catapulted from launch just 16 months ago into an AI company now worth a reported $50 billion.

The chart below underlines just how rapid xAI's rise has been.

So how does that $50 billion compare to the competition?

It took OpenAI, last valued at $157 billion in October, about nine years to reach the $50 billion milestone, according to PitchBook data.

Elon Musk, starting with a team of 12 people in July 2023, did it in less than a year and a half.

The $50 billion valuation furthers the valuation gap between xAI and smaller rivals like Anthropic (valued at $19 billion) and Perplexity (valued at $2.8 billion), and has it approaching the market cap of companies like the fast-fashion giant Shein, which was valued at $66 billion last year.

It's also a testament to the high level of investor interest in the so-called Musk economy of companies he oversees — and his ability to raise vast sums of money quickly (also see the billions in funding Musk quickly put together to support his acquisition of Twitter).

The startup, which created the AI chatbot Grok and the large language model Grok-2 that underpins it, recently set up an AI data center brimming with Nvidia H100 chips. Musk said the process took 122 days — and the startup plans to double the number of AI chips in the center in the coming months.