A public breakup between two of the world's most powerful people came as one looked to raise billions for a data center buildout.

Elon Musk's split with President Donald Trump was on the same day that Morgan Stanley tried to help generative AI company xAI raise $5 billion.

The Wall Street Journal reports that xAI executives were speaking to Wall Street about the company’s data center buildout and AI chatbot Grok, this past Thursday.

Morgan Stanley had been hoping to sell the debt at around 100 cents on the dollar, with the close relationship between President Trump and White House adviser Musk having helped boost stocks in Musk's businesses, and reverse a decline in the valuation of social platform X (which is merging with xAI).

However, that relationship blew up spectacularly on Thursday, with Trump threatening to cancel all of Musk's government contracts, and the South African billionaire claiming that Trump was in the Epstein Files (tweets he has since deleted).

After the fight, the WSJ reports that X’s outstanding debt traded down several points Thursday at around 95 cents on the dollar. As of Friday, the loans had moved closer to 97 cents.

Morgan Stanley had also originally hoped to sell some of the loans and bonds with a 12 percent interest rate. Now, investors say they expect Morgan Stanley to offer a discount on the xAI bonds, a hike in the interest rate, or other benefits to close the deal.

Despite the chaos, one adviser to the company said that demand has only increased since Thursday.

Alongside the debt sale, xAI also plans to raise $300m in stock in a deal that would value the company at $113bn.

Musk's business launched its Colossus supercomputer last year, with a reported 100,000 GPUs, but Musk said in October 2024 that plans are afoot to increase this to 200,000.

The company revealed in December that it would eventually like to run one million GPUs at the site in Memphis. DCD reported in February that the company could open a second data center, and is in talks with Dell over a $5 billion order for new servers.

The next month, it bought land in the city for a second data center.