What an interesting piece of news this was as the owner of X, Elon Musk, has decided to sell the platform to another one of his company called xAI. He says quote:
“@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).
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.
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. 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.
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.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support.”
As to why this was done, obviously there is a good match where the AI platform has a lot of data to work with this way. However, apparently another reason was to solve some of the financial challenges of operating X in general due to all the political issues. So, it’s a win-win for Musk I suppose and it’s interesting to see how a little shuffle of sort can dramatically increase the value of a property that is still technically owned by the same person.
A lot of owners do that of course where they try and help their other businesses by leveraging the strengths of their other owned assets. It has to make sense of course too but it’s something to think about if you have multiple businesses.