Elon Musk sells X to his own xAI for 33 billion dollars in all-stock deal

Elon Musk has sold social media site X to his own xAI artificial intelligence company in a 33 billion dollar (£25.5 billion) all-stock deal, the billionaire announced.

Both companies are privately held, which means they are not required to disclose their finances to the public.

Mr Musk said in a post on X that the move will “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach”.

He said the deal values xAI at 80 billion dollars (£61.8 billion) and X at 33 billion dollars.

Mr Musk, who serves as chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX as well as an adviser to President Donald Trump, bought the site then called Twitter for 44 billion dollars (£34 billion) in 2022, gutted its staff and changed its policies on hate speech, misinformation and user verification and renamed it X.

He launched xAI a year later.

“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,” Mr Musk wrote on X.

“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.”

It is not clear if the move will change anything for X users – xAI already uses data from X user posts to train its artificial intelligence models and paying X users have access to its AI chatbot Grok.