Elon Musk said Friday that his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, had acquired his social media platform, X. NBC News reported. He said the deal was an all-stock transaction that valued X at $33 billion.

“xAI and X’s future are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine to data, models, compute, distribution, and talent,” Musk wrote in a post on X.

The deal combines two of Musk’s most high-profile companies, but because they are not publicly traded, no details about the deal were made public outside of Musk’s post. It’s unclear if the deal included any immediate windfall for Musk.

X recently raised $1 billion from investors, valuing it at $44 billion, according to Bloomberg. Musk then took X (then Twitter) private in 2022 at nearly the same valuation. Musk was recently served with an SEC summons in the long-running lawsuit over Musk’s alleged failure to disclose his ownership in Twitter before bidding to buy it entirely.

The Verge reported: A few years after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, including $12 billion in debt it had as part of its takeover. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending XAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” writes Musk.

Despite falling so far to make X an “everything app,” Musk has tied these two ventures together closely since launching xAI in the summer of 2023, saying that the vast trove of data from Twitter/X would give it a major advantage and prominently placing xAI’s Grok tool within the social app.  This week, Grok launched an integration beyond X, joining Telegram.

The Guardian reported: Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence firm has acquired Musk’s X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — for $33bn, marking the latest twist in the billionaire’s rapid consolidation of power.

The all-stock deal announced Friday combines two of Musk’s multiple portfolio companies, which also include automaker Tesla and SpaceX, and potentially eases Musk’s ability to train his AI model known as Grok.

Musk announced the transaction in a post on X, saying: “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.”

Neither X nor xAI spokespersons immediately responded to requests for comment. Much of the deal’s specifics remained unclear, such as how investors may be compensated, how X leaders would be integrated into the new firm or the prospect of regulatory scrutiny.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system — and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely — at risk, WIRED reported.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programing languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to the data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. 

Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency budget DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, the Washington Post reported this week.

Politico reported: Elon Musk and his staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency defended their work in an hour long interview on Fox News as they look to cut down the size of the federal government and eliminate “fraud and waste.”

In the wide-ranging interview Thursday, Musk and his staffers — a group that has been notably out of the public spotlight amid ongoing controversies from DOGE — laid out their vision for efficiency across government agencies, from the Interior Department to the Small Business Administration.

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, Musk and his team at DOGE have cut down entire agencies and instituted mass layoffs and voluntary buy-outs. Musk said they’ve made progress, but there’s more to do.

Musk and his team tackled one of the great controversies they’ve faced in their mission to modernize the federal government: social security.

Democrats have slammed Musk for cutting jobs and creating instability within the Social Security Administration. The Social Security Administration website has crashed numerous times of the last few weeks, while the agency has been overwhelmed with phone calls and has plans to cut thousands of staffers.

RawStory reported: WIRED is reporting that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is launching a major effort to completely rebuild the codebase used by the Social Security Administration in a matter of mere months.

According to experts who spoke with Wired, the effort to migrate the SAA’s database from the COBOL programming language to a more modern language such as Java.

Experts who spoke with WIRED said that this kind of operation is fraught with peril and could trigger what the publication describes as a “system collapse” if not done with the utmost care.