Breaking: xAI acquired X (formerly Twitter)

Elon Musk founder and CEO of xAI and owner of social media site X (formerly Twitter) has announced that that his AI company has now acquired the X in an all-stock transaction.

According to Musk, the combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45 billion less $12 billion 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.” wrote Musk on X while announcing this acquisition.

Musk founded xAI in March 2023 as a public benefit corporation focused on artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

This development will initiate the official combination of data, models, computing power, distribution and employee capacity.

“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.” Musk added.

xAI has some of the most popular talent across the board from Google and other AI firms to develop Grok, its large language model (LLM) chatbot.

Grok made a debut in late 2023 exclusively for X Premium+ users. At that time, the AI can only conduct text-to-text conversations, but that changed over the course of 2024.

The chatbot now offers image generation, file identification, web search results and voice to voice conversation. Throughout this time, xAI also expanded Grok’s access on X. It is available on each post, comment and profile to give you an insight or detailed explanation.

This new acquisition makes a lot of sense since Grok is now deeply connected to X’s data and user base. However, there’s no official announcement made about the direction the merger will take from here.