Musk acquired Twitter over two years ago before rebranding it as X.
Elon Musk has revealed that he sold the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to his artificial intelligence company xAI in an all-stock transaction valued at $33 billion (€30.5 billion).
Musk acquired Twitter over two years ago before rebranding it as X.
Both companies remain privately held, exempting them from public financial disclosures. Musk shared on X that the “combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).”
He elaborated, “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.”
Musk emphasised the interconnected futures of xAI and X, stating, “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, “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.”
Musk, who also advises President Donald Trump in the unofficial DOGE department, initially purchased Twitter for $44 billion (€40 billion) in 2022. Following the acquisition, he implemented significant workforce reductions, altered policies on hate speech, misinformation, and user verification, and rebranded the platform as X.
A year later, Musk launched xAI. In December, he announced plans to expand the AI start-up’s supercomputer, ‘Colossus,’ to compete with rivals like OpenAI. This expansion involves increasing the number of GPUs to accelerate the development of new AI models.
The implications of this move for X users remain uncertain. Currently, xAI leverages data from X user posts to train its AI models, while paying X users have access to its AI chatbot, Grok.
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