The world’s richest man might get even richer (Picture: Getty/Shutterstock/Reuters) Two of Elon Musk’s firms – SpaceX and xAI – have merged to become the world’s most valued company in the world at more than $1.25 trillion. The billionaire’s rocket and satellite maker acquired the smaller AI startup last night, according to a blog post from Musk on the SpaceX website. The acquisition brings together xAI – which faced a flood of criticism for its AI chatbot Grok producing sexualised images of women and children – with the most successful private space company in the world. Musk said his reasons for the merger were simple: he wants to build a ‘sentient sun’, get humans to Mars and build cosmic data centres. Earth-based data centres – which power AI – have such a big appetite for electricity that they’re projected to use as much power as Argentina. They have pushed the electricity bills up for people who live near them and are forcing officials to carry out expensive upgrades to power grids. A mock-up of Musk’s orbital data centres (Picture: SpaceX) On this, Musk said: ‘The only logical solution, therefore, is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called “space” for a reason. 😂’ ‘By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. ‘It’s always sunny in space!’ Why merge SpaceX with xAI now? That’s the trillion-dollar question. Musk, the world’s richest man, already combined his social media platform X with xAI last year. Musk’s other firms include the electric vehicle-maker Tesla and Neuralink, a brain interface company.