Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) firm xAI has acquired the billionaire’s micro-blogging site X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock transaction that values xAI at US$80 billion and X at US$33 billion. Musk announced xAI and X’s future being “intertwined” on Friday in a post on X.
“Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent.” Musk wrote further, adding that the move would “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” According to Musk, the purchase price was US$45 billion less US$12 billion in debt.
An investor in xAI told Reuters they were not surprised by the deal, viewing it as Musk consolidating his leadership and management at his own companies.
The Guardian reports that Musk did not ask investors for approval but told them that the two companies had been collaborating closely and the integration would drive deeper integration with Grok.
Much of the deal’s specifics remained unclear, such as how investors may be compensated, how X’s leaders would be integrated into the new firm, or the prospect of regulatory scrutiny.
The tech billionaire acquired the microblogging social network in October of 2022 in a hostile takeover that cost him US$44 billion and made it private. The company has since undergone several changes, the most notable one being the change of the site’s name from Twitter to X. The company also killed off the social platform’s verification system, leading to the revamping of Twitter Blue, now Premium, to include a paid verification service. Linda Yaccarino, who Musk hired as CEO of X in May 2023, wrote in a post following Musk’s announcement, “The future could not be brighter. ”
Musk also launched xAI in 2023, spending billions of dollars on high-end Nvidia chips for the venture. The startup in December raised US$6 billion in a funding round that valued the company at US$45 billion. However, according to Musk, xAI’s valuation is now even higher, at US$80 billion. In February this year, xAI released the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, a frontier AI model that’s competitive with the industry’s leading AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.
See also: Elon Musk’s xAI Has Now Made Grok Chatbot Open Source
