Elon Musk’s X has a new owner—Elon Musk’s xAI

xAI buys X; deal values social network at $33 billion, $11B less than Musk paid.

See full article...

 

[jonah]

I’m sure all the investors in Twitter felt perfectly free to say “no thanks” to this deal, considering Elon can sic the FTC, DOJ, and SEC on them. Because he controls basically the entire executive branch except Trumps executive order sharpie.

 

[DerHabbo]

I’m sure all the investors in Twitter felt perfectly free to say “no thanks” to this deal, considering Elon can sic the FTC, DOJ, and SEC on them. Because he controls basically the entire executive branch except Trumps executive order sharpie.

Pretty sure he controls that too given Trump's arbitrary bitching about Autopens a couple weeks ago.

 

[DaVuVuZeLa]

Imagine being some kind of weird true believer with a stake in xAI, and today you learn that your beloved AI company is now devoting its resources to keeping Elon's drowning social media company (bought at a premium while high) above water.

They're probably the same weird true believers that thought Tesla buying up his brother's failing solar electric company was also a good thing.

 

[LordInternet]

He's trying to hide the collapse of X in terms of revenue and valuation inside of his AI hype grift, it's all a shell game to keep his net worth from collapsing and make it more difficult for the loans to be called in by the banks or the Saudis over the valuation clauses.

He's getting really desperate as his avenues of new (corporate) grift dry up

Yeah like that will work for a private company. No one’s day trading X stocks. Anyone investing would be doing more due diligence.

 

[jasonridesabike]

Openly committing fraud means Elon and Trump reasonably face prison if they lose power.

Losing power will quickly become an existential threat to them; staying in power worth almost any cost.

 

[dagar9]

For his sake I sure hope he cleared this with the Saudi's first.

Oh, I hope he didn't. And I hope that MrBoneSaw is pissed.

But chances are, no problem. MBS invested to buy the influence, and they've still got that. Maybe even better, because they can remind Musk what happens to people who piss them off. And invite him to come to the embassy to discuss it.

 

[Madestjohn]

Openly committing fraud means Elon and Trump reasonably face prison if they lose power.

Losing power will quickly become an existential threat to them; staying in power worth almost any cost.

Trump is immune…or so he believes

specifically he believes for any thing

but by legal precedent for ‘official duties’

which he believes he can declare what ever those are

and Elon has gotten away with blatant fraud so many times he’s feeling pretty damn cocky

and like a gambler he won’t quick a streak

 

[anguisette]

I'm guessing he's doing this to avoid getting margin called as Tesla stock continues to crater downwards

although you'd expect Tesla stock to be losing value considering everything that's going on, that doesn't seem to be happening. the stock had a big jump in November (presumably related to the election) and had returned more or less to its previous price (or slightly above) by the beginning of March. since then, it seems to be going up again.

 

[abazigal]

Is that not fleecing the investors of xAI?

Well, anyone investing in xAI probably does deserve to lose their entire investment.

 

[shableep]

I imagine the goal here was to use AI hype investor money to pay off his bank loans that he used to buy Twitter with. Effectively offloading those loans and interest payments. If that's what happened, then this is makes sense. But I suspect it took some serious convincing of the xAi investors. Maybe I'm way off base, though. Just seems like something Musk would like to do the second he has the chance. Amazing what the ultra wealthy can do with money.

 

[caramelpolice]

Well, anyone investing in xAI probably does deserve to lose their entire investment.

The AI bubble is ready to pop and xAI has produced basically nothing at all besides a bog-standard LLM, so for all intents and purposes the company is but a flaming pit for investors to throw money into.

 

[graylshaped]

So this is just Musk playing shell games to suck out cash from xAI while transferring the liabilities for tanking Twitter off his personal balance sheet and onto the balance sheet of an entity he can just walk away from right?

Trump did it with a publicly held casino company, so he knows Trump thinks it is a perfectly cromulent thing to do.

 

[graylshaped]

So Xai paid $33B for the stock and assumed $12B of debt. That means X was worth $45B, a $1B increase from when Musk bought it. Please correct the article and sub-title. See “enterprise value” for reference (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_value).

I'm confused. The report was that it was an all-stock transaction, which I took to mean investors in The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter received share(s) in Grok's Daddy. We don't know what either of these companies are "worth," only what Mush says the relationship between the two is.

When a legitimate third party holder issues a filing that has a value that can be translated into something other than WishCoin, we'll know what it is worth. Absent documented bids, it's all farts. and mirrors. The real question is who holds the debt now, and what that means for Musk's Tesla collateral.

 

[Eurynom0s]

you forgot the resources stolen from Tesla to start XAI

jfc I knew that but apparently the firehose of fascism the last two months powerwashed it out of my brain

for anyone else who needs a reminder: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elo...hip-ai-chips-reserved-for-tesla-to-x-xai.html

 

[EBone]

Funny you say that. We did a business deal to buy a building (to build a datacenter) and it was on three different plats of land, one of which were a lot of parking spaces we didn't need, and one was an empty lot. The plan was to build the datacenter, split the plats, and sell two.

The real-estate appraisal for the lots came in at exactly what we paid for it. We said "Wait, we underpaid for one, and there are two other lots and they have utilities and can sustain new builds so why are they worth nothing?"

Appraiser said: "Buyer bought for N$. Seller sold for N$. Therefore the comp is: the properties are worth N$."

So you can sell the car to yourself for $1M. Buyer thinks it's worth $1M. Seller thinks it's worth $1M. You would fail the arms-length transaction rule but let's say you sold it to your buddy Jim and then Jim sold it to you for $1,000,001. That might pass. Is the car worth $1M+. The banker bros say yes.

Excellent point. Value and worth and price are three different things.
Your car's price is $1M+.
Your car's value is what people are willing to pay for it.
Your car's worth is ... maybe market price (MP) or whatever method is agreed upon.

So infuriating. Lazy appraiser relying on comps only. Entitled property and/or property with utility connections will always have a higher value.

 

[SubWoofer2]

Impact on US GDP? Will it be detrimental, as some claim?

 

[noops]

jfc I knew that but apparently the firehose of fascism the last two months powerwashed it out of my brain

for anyone else who needs a reminder: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elo...hip-ai-chips-reserved-for-tesla-to-x-xai.html

3 card monte

 

[malfunct]

So this is just Musk playing shell games to suck out cash from xAI while transferring the liabilities for tanking Twitter off his personal balance sheet and onto the balance sheet of an entity he can just walk away from right?

I think he is also going to try and get some tax advantage from this by taking a loss on one side without reporting it as income on the other and the IRS will look the other way.

 

[zombi3g]

They're probably the same weird true believers that thought Tesla buying up his brother's failing solar electric company was also a good thing.

A lot of Musk’s companies aren’t inherently bad. They’re just run into the ground by mismanagement by Elon. Electric cars are a thing. Solar panels are a thing. Rockets are a thing. Social networks are a thing. Most other companies doing these things have been successful.

 

[hive]

Translated to EN-US:
Idiot screws up one company with another.

What a moron. Oh sorry, xMoron.

Nice i‘m nicking the xMoron

 

[Sulis]

I was always promised by Cryptonomicron that minority shareholder suits would put a stop to funny shenanigans like this. But I guess that was just science fiction.

Where is The Dentist when you need him?

 

[sleepyox]

Imagine twitterAI poisoning the world with manufactured realities posted by terrorist AI-PAC and heritage foundation scammerpreneur ameritard patriots headed by a south-african child of apartheid with a chip on his shoulder.

 

[tumblrfan69]

A lot of Musk’s companies aren’t inherently bad. They’re just run into the ground by mismanagement by Elon. Electric cars are a thing. Solar panels are a thing. Rockets are a thing. Social networks are a thing. Most other companies doing these things have been successful.

Oh but they are inherently bad becuase they're owned by a nazi.

Additionally it's no surprise that Twitter is the worst run of his companies as it's the one venture that lacks the "babysitting layer" between him and the workers. His other companies have people showing him nice sounding charts and graphs to keep him happy like a preschooler and to keep him away from interfering with the smart people capable of doing things.

 

[EricM2]

Now this lead ballon will surely do wonders to the valuation of xAI...
I guess the next steps in this shell game are:

1. xAI valuation tanks. Sharholders question transaction, Musk's net woth declining.
2. SpaceX buys xAI for 100B to stop shareholder lawsuits about xAI.
3. SpaceX tanks also, sharholders question transaction, Musk's net woth declining.
4. Tesla buys SpaceX for 150B to stop shareholder lawsuits about SpaceX
5. Tesla tanks

The Musk house of cards starts coming down in a different way I expected...

 

[fyo]

I'm confused. The report was that it was an all-stock transaction, which I took to mean investors in The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter received share(s) in Grok's Daddy. We don't know what either of these companies are "worth," only what Mush says the relationship between the two is.

When a legitimate third party holder issues a filing that has a value that can be translated into something other than WishCoin, we'll know what it is worth. Absent documented bids, it's all farts. and mirrors. The real question is who holds the debt now, and what that means for Musk's Tesla collateral.

We actually do have that. xAI raised $6bn in series c funding in late November that valued the company at $45bn.

Since the most recent deal valued xAI at $80bn, feel free to divide by 2.

 

[Emotion_ology]

He's trying to hide the collapse of X in terms of revenue and valuation inside of his AI hype grift, it's all a shell game to keep his net worth from collapsing and make it more difficult for the loans to be called in by the banks or the Saudis over the valuation clauses.

He's getting really desperate as his avenues of new (corporate) grift dry up

Bingo

 

[EricM2]

We actually do have that. xAI raised $6bn in series c funding in late November that valued the company at $45bn.

Since the most recent deal valued xAI at $80bn, feel free to divide by 2.

https://www.agbi.com/ai/2024/12/regional-investors-rush-to-musks-6bn-xai-funding-round/

They raised 6bn from, among others, Saudi Arabia, Quatar and Oman state investment funds.
Presumably they told investors at the time, the money would be used for building AI, but now Musk takes that money (plus much more from xAI) to bail out himself from his severely mismanaged Twitter takeover and puts out just a fantasy number as new "valuation" of the combined Twitter/xAI entity.
It would be interesting to hear from anyone participating in this funding round on why that is not regarded as fraud.
Pissing off shareholders is a problem that can usually be handled by lawyers - but I guess few people successfully pissed off shareholders that literally run their own death squads.

 

[EricM2]

Imagine twitterAI poisoning the world with manufactured realities posted by terrorist AI-PAC and heritage foundation scammerpreneur ameritard patriots headed by a south-african child of apartheid with a chip on his shoulder.

What exactly do you mean by "imagine" ?

 

[Darkly]

For his sake I sure hope he cleared this with the Saudi's first.

For our sake I hope he didn't

 

[McTurkey]

We didn't prosecute Nixon.
We didn't prosecute Reagan.
We didn't prosecute Bush Jr.
We didn't prosecute the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008.
We didn't prosecute Trump.

Financial transactions like this--which have no doubt enabled Musk to get out from under the threat of a margin call on his Tesla loans--probably wouldn't stand up to regulatory scrutiny. If we'd never rolled back the restrictions on private equity and investment banking that were enacted after the last gilded age was permitted (by the post-Theodore Roosevelt Republican party) to send the economy into the worst depression it had ever experienced. Those restrictions were put in place--and the Securities and Exchange commission was created to enforce--to prevent non-publicly-auditable money from controlling large segments of the economy.

As of two years ago, more than 20% of the entire US economy was totally opaque to public scrutiny, just like SpaceX and xAI are. What's ironic is that while we the people have no visibility on xAI's finances, it's highly likely that xAI has visiblity on all of our finances thanks to the ongoing terrorist attack/coup known as "DOGE".

 

[McTurkey]

What exactly do you mean by "imagine" ?

That comment you replied to has the same energy as a vampire standing in front of a mirror saying, "Imagine if this could reflect what our eyes see!"

 

[Redwood1]

Remember that the ‘rebound’ value of X was just the fair and impartial auditors of the Saudi annual financial statement ‘revealing that while the Saudi guy lost %90 of his investment the 300 million or so he had left Musk himself ‘gave’ him $150 million to reimburse him some of the billions he lost- Musk said he was buying the ‘shares’ at the original purchase price. Advertisers or users have not ‘returned’
Now he has presumably legally offloaded those suckers ,sorry, ‘investors’ of X debt that they purchased from the banks a few months ago onto XAI balance sheet which he has raised Billions from ‘investors’ XAI May not have any revenue and appears to be just the same stock photo of a room with computers that musk posts but don’t worry XAI’s 80 Billion dollar value is not in AI but it will pivot into a car company and use its massive computing capacity to build the greatest self driving car ever which will double as an airplane and can be rented out on weekends for tourist flights over the Grand Canyon. It will fly there and back for free with its fusion engine returning to your driveway each Monday morning. XAI’s flying car will make all other legacy car and plane manufacturers obsolete dominating an industry worth 10-20 Trillion annually. The merging of XAI with X’s massive bot output of ad copy will increase the total knowledge of humanity exponentially obviating the need for libraries and schools which are a waste of time and slowing us down on our interplanetary future. Seriously every single journalist shouldn’t have repeated his assertion that Doge is feeding all this data into ‘AI’ and it was somehow ‘analyzing’ anything. Then we just fired all the probationary wirkers and cut anything with certain words in it ‘Enola Gay’ bomber being one example. A MS Word cut and replace is not exactly super intelligent computing. Tesla getting wiped out can’t happen soon enough.

 

[TimeToTilt]

For his sake I sure hope he cleared this with the Saudi's first.

More likely they demanded it.

 

[DarthSlack]

Impact on US GDP? Will it be detrimental, as some claim?

The overall US economy is something like $27 trillion. Or at least it was until Musk and Trump got their hands on it. So the combined value of X and xAI can be accurately described as a fart in a hurricane (even if you believe Musk's ketamine induced valuations). If this goes bust, the only economic impact is going to be in health care where doctors will be going insane trying to reattached all the laughed-off asses.

 

[Ploroxide]

nothing except spaceX has any real value, and even that only does due to govt subsidies.

Is that still true in 2025?

 

[Hopefully Smarter]

He's lining it up so his friend T**** (the convicted felon and sexual predator)®™ can easily contract his firm to unleash the unethical AI squalor before anyone can stop him

 

[danielravennest]

We found Elon's playlist:

"Never Enough" (The Greatest Showman):

All the shine of a thousand spotlights
All the stars we steal from the night sky
Will never be enough
Never be enough
Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it'll
Never be enough
Never be enough
For me

"Creep" (Radiohead):

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doin' here?
I don't belong here
I don't care if it hurts,
I wanna have control

(If you know of additional appropriate lyrics, please let me know)

 

[danielravennest]

Is this the same Grok that said that Musk is probably in violation of Wisconsin election law? Fun fact, Elon deleted the post less than half an hour later.



View: https://bsky.app/profile/burnseternal.bsky.social/post/3llhrmaknec2t

It also violates federal law:

18 U.S. Code § 597 - Expenditures to influence voting​

Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

 

[cbreak]

I guess I was right, only a complete moron would buy X. For the second time...