Elon Musk’s synthetic intelligence agency xAI has acquired his social media platform X in an all-stock transaction that values the corporate at $33 billion, together with $12 billion value of debt, the centibillionaire introduced Friday. The sale comes simply weeks after Musk reportedly raised an extra roughly $1 billion in debt financing for X that valued the corporate at $44 billion—the identical worth Musk paid for it three years in the past.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk wrote in an X put up. “At present, we formally take the step to mix the info, fashions, compute, distribution and expertise. This mixture will unlock immense potential by mixing xAI’s superior AI functionality and experience with X’s large attain.”
Each Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, and Igor Babuschkin, the cofounder of xAI, instantly posted related messages on X signaling their assist of the acquisition. “The longer term couldn’t be brighter,” Yaccarino wrote. Musk solely reposted Babuschkin’s.
It’s not recognized whether or not Yaccarino will keep in the identical position or what the acquisition will imply for X’s staff. Musk, Yaccarino, and Robert Keele, the pinnacle of xAI’s authorized workforce, didn’t reply to a request for remark previous to publication.
Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and later renamed it X in a deal that concerned taking out billions of {dollars} in loans from a bunch of Wall Avenue banks and different lenders. After Musk took over and X’s promoting enterprise slumped, the banks reportedly struggled to unload the loans to consumers. Lenders sometimes attempt to resell debt to different buyers shortly to get it off their stability sheets and revenue from related charges. The Wall Avenue Journal dubbed the fiasco “the worst buyout for banks because the monetary disaster.”
However X’s monetary state of affairs rotated after Donald Trump was reelected and Musk was appointed to run the administration’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity. Extra buyers got interested within the debt as advertisers started returning and Musk’s ties to the White Home and Trump deepened.
Musk additionally mentioned he gave X buyers a 25 % stake in xAI final yr, which helped enhance the worth of the social media platform and supply extra safety to lenders, in line with reporting from the Monetary Occasions.
Whereas xAI beforehand gave the impression to be largely enjoying catch-up with rivals like OpenAI and Google, Musk gave the startup a lift by creating an enormous cluster of 100,000 GPUs, sufficient computing assets to compete with the most important trade gamers. The supercomputer, dubbed Colossus, is positioned in Memphis, Tennessee.
On the outset, xAI’s acknowledged mission was to know the character of the universe. At present, it’s best recognized for creating an “unfiltered” chatbot known as Grok, which has been built-in as a part of the X platform since late 2023.
