Aerospace firm SpaceX is looking to raise $1.7 billion in fresh funding, a massive initiative as its controversial founder Elon Musk continues to make news, television channel CNBC reported Sunday.
Citing a company-wide email the network said it obtained, CNBC reported the space travel pioneer would be paying $70 a share — 25 percent above the $56 a share the stock traded for in February after a stock split.
That would value the 20-year-old firm — the first private company to send astronauts into orbit, among many other firsts — at $127 billion.
That valuation has climbed steadily in recent years as SpaceX raised billions to finance work on its next-generation Starship rocket and its Starlink global satellite internet network.
Meanwhile, independent online website Insider reported this week that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to resolve a complaint for alleged sexual misconduct by Musk against an attendant on a SpaceX corporate jet.
The 50-year-old Musk has rejected the charge, saying Thursday on Twitter that “for the record, those wild accusations are utterly untrue.”
Musk, who is also the CEO of carmaker Tesla, said he was making a $44 billion offer to buy Twitter.
But this week he said he first needed clarity on the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on the popular social media platform before moving forward with the purchase.
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Paris street art legend Miss Tic dies aged 66
Miss Tic, whose provocative work began cropping up in the Montmartre neighbourhood of Paris in the mid-80s and made Radhia Novat’s a pioneer of French street art, died on Sunday aged 66, her family told AFP. Radhia Novat grew up in the narrow streets in the shadow of Sacre-Coeur basilica, the daughter of a Tunisian father and a mother from Normandy in western France, where she began stencilling sly and emancipatory slogans.
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New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern alters US trip details following Covid recovery
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has shaken off the effects of Covid-19 and on Monday announced details of an altered trade mission to the United States. Ardern is scheduled to meet senior members of the US Senate when she visits Washington but a hoped-for meeting with President Joe Biden may now not happen because of health protocols. “In these times you roll with the Covid curveballs you’re thrown,” she told journalists.
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Revolutionary Guards colonel Sayyad Khodai shot dead in Tehran attack: Iran
An Iranian Revolutionary Guards colonel was shot dead outside Colonel Sayyad Khodai’s Tehran home on Sunday, the Guards said, blaming his “assassination” on assailants linked to the United States and its allies. The killing of Colonel Sayyad Khodai is the most high profile murder inside Iran since the November 2020 killing of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
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78,000 pounds of infant formula arrives in US
A military plane carrying enough specialty infant formula for more than half a million baby bottles arrived on Sunday in Indianapolis, the first of several flights expected from Europe aimed at relieving a shortage that has sent parents scrambling to find enough to feed their children. The formula weighed 78,000 pounds (35,380 kilograms), White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One as BiPresident Joe Bidenlew from South Korea to Japan.