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.