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.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, late on Monday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps, TechCrunch reported.

Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on Musk’s social network, X. Grok 3, which has been in development for several months, was optimistically slated for release in 2024, but missed that deadline.

xAI has been using an enormous data center in Memphis containing around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. In a post on X, Musk claimed that Grok 3 was developed with “10x” (or so) more computing power than its predecessor, Grok 2, using an expanded training set that includes filings from court cases and more.”

“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2,” Musk said during a live-streamed presentation on Monday. “[It’s a] maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”

Grok 3 is a family of models, to be precise. A smaller version of Grok 3, Grok 3 mini, responds to questions more quickly at the cost of some accuracy. Not all the models and related features of Grok 3 are available (some are in beta), but they began rolling out on Monday.

CNN reported: xAI on Monday unveiled its updated Grok 3 artificial intelligence model, as the Elon Musk-led startup pushes to keep pace with the advanced reasoning and search capabilities in competitors’ models.

In a event live-streamed on Musk’s X, leaders at the startup claimed Grok 3 performs better across math, science, and coding benchmarks than Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek’s V3 model, although it’s not clear how it compares to other top reasoning models such as OpenAI o3-mini and DeepSeek R1. 

The company also described the tool’s new features, such as advanced web searching with “deep search,” the ability to code online games and a “big brain” mode to reason through more complex problems.

Grok 3 is immediately available to members of X’s $40 per month “Premium+” subscription plans, or users who subscribe directly on Grok’s standalone app or website.

Engadget  reported: xAI has launched its Grok 3 models during a livestream with Elon Musk, who said they were “an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2.” 

The Grok 3 mini model can answer questions quickly, but it’s not as accurate as the other models in the family. Meanwhile, the Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning models are capable of mimicking human-like reasoning when it comes to analyzing information the user needs.

In addition to launching Grok 3 models, xAI also revealed during the event that the Grok app will get a “voice mode” within a week, giving it synthesized voices to converse with users. Grok 2, the company’s older models, will be open sourced in the coming months.

In my opinion, Elon Musk’s xAI Grok 3 model is likely to attract people who enjoy conversing with an AI app.

X users are currently unable to post links to Signal.me, which are used to quickly and securely send direct messages to Signal users. A variety of failure notifications are being reported when X users attempt to post Signal links on the platform, some of which identify the blocked message as containing spam, harmful content, or malicious activity, The Verge reported.

Signal is used by journalists to receive confidential information from source, measured by the knowledge that messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored on-device. The messaging service has become especially relevant in recent weeks as a tool for federal whistleblowers to report DOGE activity to the press.

Alongside being blocked by sharing Signal.me, links in public posts and direct messages, users are also discouraged from clicking existing links published prior to the ban, and prevented from adding them to there profile bio. An error message displayed when the latter is attempted says the update failed due to the new description being “considered malware.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that X has attempted to stifle third-party services being promoted on the platform. Links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and other rival social platforms were briefly blocked in 2022 after Elon Musk attempted to tackle “relentless advertising of competitors for free.” Substack links were also throttled and restricted in 2023 after it released its own Twitter-like “Notes” feature.

ArsTechnica reported: X,  the social platform formerly known as Twitter, is seemingly blocking links to Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, according to journalist Matt Binder and other firsthand accounts.

Binder wrote on his Disruptionist newsletter Sunday that links to Signal.me, a domain that offers a way to connect directly to Signal users, are blocked on public posts, direct messages and profile pages. Error messages — including “Message not sent,” “Something went wrong,” and profiles tagged as “considered malware” or “potentially harmful”  — give no direct suggestion of a block. But posts on X, reporting at The Verge, and other sources suggest, that Signal.me links are broadly banned. 

The Hill reported: Users on Elon Musk’s social media platform X were not able to share or post links to encrypted messaging app Signal on Monday and were greeted with various failure notifications when they tried to do so.

Beginning Sunday, multiple users posted on X that they reviewed error messages when they tried to post any links with the “Signal.me” domain, which is typically used to share one’s Signal profile and allow others to contact them on the messaging platform.

When users tried to post a Signal.me link, X provided a message: “Something when wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.” Upon trying to post it again, the same error message pops up.

Users were not able to send the Signal.me link through direct messaging, with an error message appearing to suggest that the request “might be automated.”

In my opinion, it sounds like Elon Musk absolutely does not want X users to access Signal.me. I wonder why he seems so upset about that.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has a key ally in the US Department of the Treasury: Tom Krause, a veteran technology executive who’s now a special government executive who’s now a special government employee, or consultant, at the agency, Bloomberg reported.

Until a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE’s access on Saturday, Krause had “read-only” access to Treasury’s payments system, which handles more than 1.2 billion transactions a year. The government calls it “America’s checkbook,” an essential window into the federal spending that President Donald Trump is looking to slash by $1 trillion or more.

Krause, 47, who’s serving as fiscal assistant secretary at Treasury, will keep his day job: chief executive officer of Cloud Software Group, which owns a company called Citrix Systems. His deep cost-cutting there shows why he may have appealed to Trump and Musk, the president’s adviser and Tesla Inc.’s CEo- and also why some people familiar to Krause’s record are unsettled about his new government role.

Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control, The Atlantic reported.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told The Atlantic.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes towards others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. 

Fortune reported: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s squad that’s criss-crossing US government agencies, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor.

“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from the executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”

A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm said Thursday: “I can confirm that Edward Christine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.”

Afterward, Coristine wrote that he’d retained access to the cybersecurity company’s computers, though he said he hadn’t taken advantage of it.

In my opinion, I don’t think that non-elected officials in the US government should be making any kinds of decisions when it comes to important things like social security.