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Elon Musk announced his artificial intelligence company, xAI, acquired his social media platform, X.
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The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion — $45B less $12B debt, Musk said.
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“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” the Tesla CEO wrote in the Friday announcement posted on X.
Elon Musk on Friday announced in a post on X that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, had acquired his social media platform, X, in an all-stock deal.
“The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt),” Musk wrote.
Musk purchased X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion — despite the company’s board initially being resistant to the Tesla CEO’s proposition. Musk also attempted to back out of the purchase, though he faced a $1 billion termination fee if the deal fell through. The sale was ultimately completed in October 2022, and the once publicly traded social media company went private under Musk’s ownership.
Since his acquisition of X, Musk has gutted the site’s trust and safety team, users have reported spikes in antisemitic content and other hate speech on the platform, and X has been plagued by an exodus of advertisers. Business Insider’s Peter Kafka earlier this month reported that the billionaire CEO has been so far unable to completely turn the social media site’s trajectory around, but investors have remained interested in the platform — in part due to its financial ties to xAI.
Prior to the news of the acquisition, X held a $6 billion stake in Musk’s artificial intelligence company, per Bloomberg.
Musk founded xAI in March 2023 with the goal of “building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery.” The company, a competitor to OpenAI, has since launched a large language model chatbot called Grok, which is integrated with X and relies, in part, on data generated on the site for training.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk continued in his Friday announcement. “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.”
He added: “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.”
A spokesperson for X declined to comment on the deal when reached by Business Insider. Representatives for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
