Elon Musk announced Friday that he sold social media site X to his AI startup XAI for a $33 billion all-share deal
The tech billionaire shared the news in a statement posted on X, writing: “Xai and X’s futures are already intertwined. Today, we have officially taken a step to combine data, models, calculations, distribution and talent.”
“This combination will unlock great potential by blending Xai's advanced AI capabilities and expertise with X's huge coverage,” Musk, 53, wrote in the announcement.
He added: “The merged company will provide billions with smarter, more meaningful experiences while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and promoting knowledge.”
Musk said the merger of X and XAI will “allow us to build a platform that not only reflects the world, but also actively accelerates human progress.”
Both X and XAI are privately held, meaning they do not need to disclose their financial status to the public.
Tesla and SpaceX CEOs said the deal is worth $80 billion in XAI and $33 billion in x.
It's unclear whether sales will change anything for X users – XAI has used data from X user posts to train its AI models and paid X users can access their AI Chatbot Grok.
Musk bought X for $44 billion in 2022, then called Twitter, and made $44 billion impact on its employees and changed its policies on hate speech, misinformation and user verification and renamed it to X.
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“Free speech is the cornerstone of a well-functioning democracy, and Twitter is a digital city square, where it is crucial for the future of mankind,” Musk said in a press release at the time.
A year later, Musk launched XAI, saying “quickly became one of the world’s major AI labs, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.”
In March 2023, Musk formed XAI's artificial intelligence company to compete with Chatgpt's maker Openai.
The startup is centered around the San Francisco Bay Area and employs a group of top AI researchers who have worked at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.
Musk is the co-founder and early funder of Openai, splitting ways with the San Francisco-based research lab a few years ago. With the release of Chatgpt last year and solidified its financial ties with Microsoft, he has increasingly criticized Openai for its global popularity and commercial success.
In April 2023, Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Openai’s popular chatbot has liberal biases and he planned an alternative that would be “the biggest truth-seeking AI trying to understand the nature of the universe.”
He said he plans to create an alternative for the popular AI Chatbot Chatgpt he calls “TruthGpt.”
The idea, Musk said, is that an AI that wants to understand humans is unlikely to destroy it. He also said he was worried that Chatgpt is “training to be politically correct.”
Musk also advocates adjustments to artificial intelligence, calling him a “big fan”. He called AI “more dangerous” than cars or rockets, and said it has the potential to destroy humans.
Recently, Musk said that if Chatgpt Maker abandons his plan to convert it into a for-profit company, he will abandon his $97.4 billion proposal to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI.
“If Openai, Inc.'s board of directors is ready to retain the charity's mission and stipulates that it will be signed 'for-sale' to sign its assets, please stop its conversion and Musk will withdraw the bid,” the billionaire's attorney said in a February 10 filing with the California court.
“Otherwise, the charity must compensate for the expenses paid by long-term buyers for their assets.”
Musk and a group of investors made an offer in early February, the latest dispute he had with an artificial intelligence company he helped a decade ago.
Openai is controlled by a nonprofit committee whose initial mission is to safely build AI that is superior to humans for the public good. Now, it is a fast-growing business, launching plans to officially change its corporate structure last year.
Musk and his own AI startup XAI and a consortium of investment firms hope to acquire control of the nonprofit’s for-profit OpenAi subsidiary.
Openai CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the topic in a social media post, writing: “No, thank you, but we'll buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
He also bid at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February, saying: “Openai is not for sale. Openai Mission is not for sale.”
“Elon has tried all sorts of things for a long time. It's an episode of this week. I think he might just want to slow us down,” Altman refers to Musk.
“He's obviously a competitor. He's working hard, he's raising a lot of money for Xai, they're trying to compete…I hope he can only compete by building better products, but I think there's a lot of strategies.”
–Documents with the Associated Press
& Copy 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
