4mo ago

Elon Musk says xAI has acquired X in deal that values social media site at $33 billion

www.cnbc.com

Summary

Elon Musk announced that his AI startup xAI has merged with his social media platform X in an all-stock deal, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.

Musk stated the merger will combine AI expertise with X’s broad reach.

xAI, launched less than two years ago, competes with OpenAI and has developed the Grok chatbot, integrated with X.

76 comments

why does this feel like a twitter bailout. so he gets to shuffle the financial deck of these 2 so twitter isnt a complete failure monetarily?
- yes, he uses the hype investor cash that poured into the ai boondogle to cover his insane twitter purchase and literally bail himself out of his stupidity
  
  How do i do that with a mortgage?
- It's not a xhitter bailout. It's a robbery of shareholder investment.
  If he wants to use xhitter content for grok, that's gonna be most fucked up LLM of all.
  
  It's gonna make Bender look like a commie saint
Hmm...
Manipulating stocks between companies you own for fun and profit...
Sounds pretty Ferengi to me.
And no accountings shall be held...
🙄 🤡 🤦‍♀️ 🖕
- Elon has violated securities laws blatantly for years now. Yeah, he won't be held accountable. And a good half of people still wonder why inequality is such a bad thing.
- He essentially did the same thing with Solar City a decade ago. Although that was "owned" by his cousins and he bailed them out with by buying it for a few billion.
- Bimbo AG Blondie: looks good to me! Nothing illegal.
Two companies no one wanted now one company no one wants.
- Company worthless? Sell it to yourself for a ludicrous cost to increase your market value!
  You mad, wage slaves?
  
  Then immediately borrow real money against the paper value of your new merger company. Pocket a few billion and use some to bribe the feds to not audit you.
  It's crime all the way down.
Market cap of Twitter was $41B, Musk overpaid at $44B,
Fidelity valued it at $9.4B late last year.
xAI paid $33B for it this year.
So this is a significantly worse overpay.
- This is just his left hand paying his right so he can claim Twitter's value is comparable to what he initally paid for it. He's getting fixated on people talking about his losses again, and is getting ready to call someone a pedo on main again.
- It's all to defraud investors. The SEC isn't going to touch him, and when the earnings report for Tesla is due I bet it's going to show that the woke libtards were wrong and Tesla sales actually quadrupled in the past 4 months.
- Musk overpaid at $44B,
  Yes, but about $14 billion was financed by debt rather than shares of stock, so the market cap immediately dropped to $30B as a result (enterprise value is market cap + outstanding debt because in a liquidation the debt would be paid out of the assets before the shareholders get anything). So in a sense, the current shares were worth about $30B at the time of the 2022 transaction.
  If this new merger is a private transaction that values X at $33B and xAI at $80B, and everyone agrees, it's functionally the same as if it were worth $3.3B and $8B.
- It went up after the election. Last valuation was back to $44B. It not about Twtter's valuation, it's about Tesla stock price. I don't understand the scam but I'm pretty sure he had to refinance his loan somehow because Tesla stock dropped.
I was also today years old when I read a headline about DOGE heading into the SEC.
Weird.
valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion
How is this even legal. Fuck
- “I will make it legal…”
  —Senator Palpatine
- Because DOGE controls the SEC.
  This is blatant, naked plutocratic klepocracy.
- Because money.
Neither of those valuations are supported by reality.
Honestly wasn't sure if they were talking about one of his children when they said xAI
- Pronounced 'barbara'
Musk stated the merger will combine AI expertise with X’s broad reach.
Ah yes, the famous combining two losing strategies, so they can lose money twice as efficiently.
- This reminds me of when Kmart bought Sears.
  
  At least neither Kmart nor Sears were Nazi hangouts.
This is just oligarchs moving their chess pieces around. Expect nothing to come of it. Expect elon to face zero consequences.
It shouldn't be hard. If you accept the existence of billionaires you accept that some people shouldn't ever face consequences and be rewarded for toxic behavior.
- There are supposed to be consequences?
  
  Don't interrupt when they're up on their soapbox
So… fraud.
I hope I make it out alive of the scam economy. This mother sucker gets away with murder and I have dodge scammers left and right bcz there is no justice or rule of law.
- The other day i said something along the lines of the economy having a valuation problem and i was assured that that's inaccurate and only the stock market has a valuation problem. So the economy is fine.
  /s
He added that the merger would, “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach."
He already owns and runs Xitter as a propaganda tool. Now he's openly mixing it with his own bots.
Does anyone else get a really bad feeling about this? I see a lot of comments talking about this financially, but I haven't seen any comments talking about the disinformation potential that comes with artificially seeding a social media site with his own AI bots. Granted, Grok's responses have been based (so far), but that's not guaranteed to last.
I don't know exactly what the game plan is here, but the pieces are all laid out for Musk to spread his influence behind AI anonymity. That worries me.
- No, I'm not getting a really bad feeling about it, any more than I get a bad feeling about the other right-wing social media sites. If they want their own little echo chamber because they don't feel safe on ones they don't control, then great. It gets them off of social media the rest of us use.
  As for it reinforcing their bad behavior, that's going to happen no matter what. These people want to be hateful little shits, and no amount of hand-wringing about misinformation is gonna change that. If Elon wasn't a nazi, they would just go search out something controlled by somebody who was.
- Honestly it's probably to mess with the valuation. It's propped up partially by Tesla shares iirc.
- Separate the labor force from communications. Allow hateful and xenophobic rhetoeric to form separation and infighting. Infighting is unproductive use of free time.
  While it effectively does nothing, it also reinforces ones own beliefs. Essentially an internet echo chamber without the guise of individualism. It keeps people looking to their family purely for love, growth, and gauging of decisions. However, growth has stopped there for folks.
  It becomes easier to look outwardly for approval for your actions, rather than inwardly for motive of said acts.
xAI is 80 billion? That's a load of shit.
I used to think it was a straight market manipulation to short the market, coupled with a crypto scam.
Here's my latest prediction for the next step: as well as being a geopolitical tool, I think they plan to use Trump's tariffs as a way to funnel more tax revenue into US Government to be directly laundered for themselves personally. The reduced order volume doesn't matter to them because 25%, 50%, 100% or whatever tariff they charge goods and services will go straight to the US government to be compliantly fed into Musk's ever-expanding business interests via government contracts. Some of those in the loop get vested stock options and get to run away with exponentially more money than they would without tariffs. Musk has already paid his dues so probably thinks they owe him.
They already tried to alter an agreement for 480,000 contract to Tesla for armed cybertrucks to be 480,000,000 and backdated it to look like it was agreed by Biden last year.
I expect to see a multi-billion AI contract awarded solely to xAI in the near future.
He can't even justify to himself that Twitter is worth the $44 billion he (and investors) paid for it.
- And you'd think a self-perceived business genius would be able to significantly increase the value of said purchase, not lose billions.
Thats a $11B writeoff btw
- Haha I thought selling my model Y at 11k loss was bad. Fuck that guy and the horse he rode in on.
His company has bought his company? That doesn’t sound right even in USA.
The only Illigal thing in murica now is being poor
- And protesting against Israel.
while he simultaneously claims AI is less than a decade away from eradicating all humans. how very philanthropist of him.
- I think he made an attempt to force regulation on it, with the purpose of delaying development so he could catch up, because he is way way behind.
He is struggling. Keep it going folks. Let's send this mofo back to South Africa. Not sure if they even want him.
- I guess we can all settle with a dog cage in Guantanamo then
- We don't. Our Government pretty much hates the guy.
  
  Can you agree to take him then rescind the offer when he's in the middle of the Atlantic, and we both lock our doors and pretend not to hear him knocking?
- He'll feel right at home in orania I suspect.
So we're just making shit up now?
- But he said so himself! He even twirled where his mustache would be if he could grow one!
"Hmmm...I think it's worth seventyhundrillion...yeah that sounds right...seventyhundrillion".
To be fair, a social media platform IS valuable data for an AI company. But we all know this is just a self-dealing bailout using investor money.
A true dream come true! Just what everyone has been begging to happen.
Geez that AI company would probably love to scrape all this government data. Sure that is worth something...
Tilted.

76 comments