Musk's xAI acquires X for $33 billion in stocks

Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, has acquired X for $33 billion in a pure-stock trade. This figure accounts for a $45 billion valuation minus $12 billion in debt. Musk had purchased Twitter for $44 billion in cash in 2022, then changed its name to X.

Musk noted that X has over 600 million active users, and the platform continues to be a popular destination since its launch in 2006. The company's stock price has also risen in recent years.

xAI was launched in 2023 with private funding and a motto to 'understand the universe'. Its Grok AI has climbed the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard to become one of the top three most powerful AI models in existence today. Grok was built on a 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPU supercomputer called Colossus.

The company recently received $6 billion in Series C funding in December 2024 from a long list of investors, including Blackrock, Kingdom Holdings, Morgan Stanley, and Sequoia Capital. This will allow xAI to expand Colossus into a 200,000 Nvidia Hopper GPU supercomputer.

Grok currently has access to public X posts, and the acquisition will likely result in changes to what xAI's AI can access since Musk remarked, "Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent." Users who are concerned about AI use of their X information for eternity should consider moving to other social media platforms and deleting their X accounts.

Readers who want to develop new uses with the open-source Grok AI model can pick up a fast Nvidia GPU (sold here on Amazon).