A few years after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform that’s now known as X. 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 his takeover.
Musk has tied the two ventures together closely since launching xAI in the summer of 2023, saying that its access to 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. As we noted in January, xAI staffers were also X employees, with company laptops and access to its code base. Musk had also previously claimed X investors would own 25 percent of XAI, but as of January, that had not materialized for X employees with shares in the company.
While X’s valuation had reportedly dropped since the 2022 takeover, the value of xAI has only risen, along with other companies in the space like Nvidia and OpenAI, where Musk has gone from co-founder and early investor to legal antagonist after walking away from it in 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported xAI had been valued at $50 billion in an investment round last November, more than double its $24 billion valuation during another funding round in the spring of 2024.
@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).
Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.
X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth.
xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach. The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge. This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.
I would like to recognize the hardcore dedication of everyone at xAI and X that has brought us to this point. This is just the beginning.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support.
Developing…
Leave a Reply