This is a combination of pictures created on October 10, 2023, showing (L) SpaceX, X and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Paris, on June 16, 2023 and (R) the new Twitter logo rebranded as X, pictured on a screen in Paris on July 24, 2023. | Photo by Alain JOCARD / AFP
Elon Musk has sold social media site X to his own xAI artificial intelligence company in a $33 billion all-stock deal, the billionaire announced on Friday.
Both companies are privately held, which means they are not required to disclose their finances to the public.
Musk said in a post on X that the move will “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” He said the deal values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. Musk, who serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX as well as an advisor to President Donald Trump, bought the site then called Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, gutted its staff and changed its policies on hate speech, misinformation and user verification and renamed it X.
He launched xAI a year later.
READ: Elon Musk says xAI startup buying X platform
“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,” Musk wrote on X. “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.”
It’s not clear if the move will change anything for X users — xAI already uses data from X user posts to train its artificial intelligence models and paying X users have access to its AI chatbot, Grok, while nonpaying users can ask the chatbot 10 questions every 2 hours.