Elon Musk has officially announced the sale of X in an "all-stock transaction" — but not to a competitor. Instead, the website formally known as Twitter has been acquired by Musk’s very own AI venture, xAI.
A $33 billion sale, this move combines two of the largest companies in Musk’s growing portfolio. Musk originally bought Twitter in 2022 for a total of $44 billion.
“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.
“This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach. The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to the core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.”
@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination 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…March 28, 2025
What is xAI?
xAI was founded in 2023. In the rush against the likes of OpenAI and Google to advance artificial intelligence, xAI has very much the same aim. xAI, at the moment, is best known for Grok — the AI chatbot that started out integrated into X before being spun out on its own.
Grok is similar to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. It has image-generation abilities, can discuss trending topics, code websites, and think deeply about topics.
Like other competing AI brands, xAI is also working on research in the background, developing artificial intelligence in other ways.
In his announcement post about the merger, Musk described X as “the digital town square where more than 600m active users go” before highlighting the opportunity to combine data and models.
It isn’t yet clear what this means for users of X, or for future development of AI under the branding but it looks very much like a consolidation move to shore up the development of Grok against ChatGPT and Gemini.
xAI has already used data from the social media site during its initial training program, learning from real-time data and this merger will likely expedite this process. Musk claims combining the two companies would lead to delivering "smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people."
Regardless of Musk's reputational standing at present, Grok is an AI tool to be reckoned with — as we found out ourselves this month during the Tom's Guide AI Madness chatbot tournament.
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