In a stunning tweet, Musk announces the sale of "X" for $45 billion
In a surprising announcement made Friday afternoon in a tweet, Elon Musk said that he sold social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to his AI startup firm xAI for $45 billion in stock. The deal includes $12 billion in debt owed by X. With the transaction, xAI has a valuation of $80 billion said Musk in the tweet. That is double xAI's valuation of $40 billion used in a recent funding round that raised $6 billion for the startup that Elon launched in 2023.
@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).
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2025
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…
You might recall that Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. As soon as the deal closed in October of that year, Musk fired executives including some he was forced to rehire to keep the operation running. After getting off to a rough start over verification checkmarks and losing some key advertisers including Apple, things have settled down. Along the way, Musk changed the name of the platform to X from Twitter and added three tiers of service that start at $4 per month and run as high as $50 per month.
"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. 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."-Elon Musk
Since neither X nor xAI are publicly traded, the only information about the deal is the tweet posted by Musk which is embedded in this article. Thus, there is no way of determining whether Elon benefits financially from the transaction. On March 10th, the wealthiest man in the world had a rough day starting with outages at X that Musk blamed on massive cyberattacks committed by a large, coordinated group or a country. That same day, Tesla shares declined by 14% wiping approximately $15 billion from Musk's wealth.
Today's transaction comes about six weeks after Musk offered to buy OpenAI, the AI R&D company that owns ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, swiftly turned down the bid.
AI remains the hottest sector in tech and Musk has big plans for xAI. Making a deal that increases the company's valuation might be part of something big that the multi-billionaire is planning. The startup company created large language model (LLM) chatbot GrokAI that is available to X users.
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