Tech Mogul Combines Social Media Platform with AI Venture in Multi-Billion Dollar Merger

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Elon Musk has announced a major business consolidation, merging his social media company X with his artificial intelligence startup xAI in a deal valuing the platforms at $33 billion and $80 billion respectively.

The tech entrepreneur revealed the agreement through his X account on March 28, explaining the strategic rationale: “The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt),” Musk stated. “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.”

In his announcement, Musk emphasized X’s position as a “digital town square” serving over 600 million active users. He highlighted the platform’s transformation “into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth” since his acquisition.

The merger comes approximately 14 months after xAI launched Grok, an AI chatbot competitor to ChatGPT. According to Musk, the time was right to “take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent” between his two companies.

This development follows Musk’s original acquisition of Twitter in April 2022 for approximately $44 billion, which he later rebranded as X. At that time, he expressed his vision for the platform: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”

During the initial acquisition, Musk outlined ambitious plans for the platform, including “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

Meanwhile, in his personal life, the 53-year-old entrepreneur recently welcomed his 14th child in February, his fourth with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. The couple’s children include newborn Arcadia and twins Strider and Azure, born in November 2021.

Earlier in February, author Ashley St. Clair claimed via X that she had given birth to Musk’s 13th child five months prior.

Musk’s other children include six with ex-wife Justine Wilson (with whom he was married from 2000 to 2008): twins Vivian and Griffin (20), and triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian (18). The former couple also had son Nevada, who tragically died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks old in 2002.

With musician Grimes (Claire Boucher), whom he dated from 2018 until their separation in 2022, Musk shares three children: son X Æ A-Xii, daughter Exa Dark Sideræl (born via surrogate), and son Techno Mechanicus.