Former Tesla Inc. board member Steve Westly said Elon Musk’s xAI could challenge Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, but warned that entering artificial intelligence’s top tier will demand heavy spending and execution. “Can xAI really break in with the big boys Anthropic, OpenAI and Google? I think they can, but that’s going to be heavy lifting,” Westly said on Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. He added that beating General Motors and Ford in electric vehicles was “a lot easier” than tackling those AI leaders. His warning followed SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company. Second-quarter revenue nearly doubled to $7.8 billion, while the company posted a $541 million net loss, or 9 cents per share. Starlink revenue rose 66% and subscribers doubled to 12 million. Shares fell 9% in premarket trading on spending concerns. Quarterly capital spending reached $18.4 billion, including $15.83 billion for AI infrastructure. The AI division generated $2.6 billion in revenue, more than triple the year-earlier level, but remained unprofitable. SpaceX signed another $6.7 billion in cloud contracts after the quarter ended. Westly called SpaceX “an incredible growth engine,” but said xAI must add users and sell to consumers and businesses. Musk defended the spending, saying, “We’re building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else, we believe, and we’re