Elon Musk’s AI platform xAI acquires social media platform X for $45 billion

Elon Musk said on Friday that his xAI has acquired X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock transaction for USD 45 billion, including USD 12 billion debt.

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said in a post on X, adding that the combined company would be valued at USD 80 billion.

Neither X nor xAI immediately responded to a request for comment.

The billionaire’s AI startup, which was launched in 2023, recently raised USD 6 billion from investors in a funding round that valued the company at USD 40 billion, sources told Reuters earlier.

Musk in February made a USD 97.4 billion bid with a consortium for the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which was rejected, with OpenAI saying that the startup was not for sale.

As competition in AI intensifies, xAI has been ramping up its data centre capacity to train more advanced models, and its supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, called “Colossus”, is touted as the largest in the world.

xAI introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot, in February, as it tries to compete with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek and Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Musk clinched a deal in 2022 to buy X for USD 44 billion, ending its run as a public company since its 2013 initial public offering, declaring that “the bird is freed” once the acquisition closed.