Elon Musk was busy Tuesday, with plans to show off the transportation tunnels his Boring Company has dug out under a section of Los Angeles at a company event in the evening.
Between the Boring Company, running Tesla and seeing that his SpaceX company’s rockets get off the ground as planned, Musk is used to being busy. And raising $500 million will keep Musk busy no matter what else he has going on.
That $500 million is what the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk’s SpaceX is in the process of raising in order to help fund Starlink, a planned satellite-based internet service. And with that funding, SpaceX’s value is set to go even higher.
Citing “people familiar with the fundraising,” the Journal said the new financing will raise SpaceX’s current valuation $30.5 billion; its worth was pegged at $28 billion when it completed a round of funding in April.
The new round of funding is said to include current SpaceX shareholders, and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co., a Scottish money-management firm. Baillie Gifford is no stranger to cutting checks to invest in Musk-led projects as it owns a 7.6 percent stake in Tesla, according to the Journal, which cited data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Terms of the new financing have reportedly been agreed upon, and SpaceX could see the money in its coffers by the end of the year.
SpaceX intends to use the financing to build up its early stage Starlink project, which is set to use more than 4,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit to provide internet service.
SpaceX was set to launch one of its Falcon 9 rockets Tuesday morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida, but the company had to delay the launch due to a error from an on-board flight computer. The launch has been rescheduled for Wednesday morning.
