Elon Musk, nominally in charge of “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and one of Trump’s confidants, has sold his social-media site X (formerly Twitter) to xAI—Musk’s fledgling, in-house artificial intelligence company. He made the announcement on X itself. From Associated Press:
Elon Musk has sold social media site X to his own xAI artificial intelligence company in a $33 billion all-stock deal, the billionaire announced on Friday. Both companies are privately held, which means they are not required to disclose their finances to the public.
AP added that Musk had already been using the X user base to help train AI models. “It’s 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, while nonpaying users can ask the chatbot 10 questions every 2 hours.”
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
Caleb Encarma has a fantastic story up for Musk Watch (sister publication to Popular Information), detailing the latest chapter in Elon’s troubled-media company. The stated valuation itself is cause for raised eyebrows:
With some top companies resuming advertising on the platform, Musk declared a new $44 billion valuation for X last month, even though some X investors valued the company at $12 billion as recently as last December. Musk went on to claim that X had doubled its annual profits since he bought it.
Musk is also apparently exploiting proximity to “leadership” (term used very loosely) in D.C. to “strong-arm” the advertiser community.
To pressure advertisers to return to the platform, X has reportedly sought to leverage Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that X chief executive Linda Yaccarino and a lawyer for the company threatened the ad agency Interpublic, telling the firm that if its clients failed to increase their spending on X, the Trump administration could sabotage Interagency’s planned merger with Omnicom Group.
I suspect there are other details yet to drop about this transaction and we at TrumpFile will update with new entries as details come available. Remember, Elmo’s initial Twitter purchase was riddled with lies, chaos and exaggerations and this transaction should be viewed through the same lens.
