BREAKING: Elon Musk announces xAI acquisition of X

X owner Elon Musk announced on Friday that the social media company has been acquired by xAI, an artificial intelligence company also owned by Musk.

Musk said that X was acquired "in an all-stock transaction" and that the combination of these two companies "values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B 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," Musk wrote.

He said that X has served as a "digital town square" in which over 600 million 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."

"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," Musk wrote. "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."

"This is just the beginning," Musk concluded.

Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. In late 2023, Grok, the AI chatbot created by xAI, was launched for premium users on X. Around one year later, an updated version of Grok was made available to all users on the platform. 

In February, xAI announced the Grok 3 Beta, which was touted as "our most advanced model yet, blending superior reasoning with extensive pretraining knowledge."