Elon Musk’s xAI startup just bought X for $45 billion

(Reuters) – Elon Musk said on Friday that his xAI has acquired X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock transaction for $45 billion, including $12 billion debt.

“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, adding that the combined company would be valued at $80 billion.

Neither X nor xAI immediately responded to a request for comment.

The billionaire’s AI startup, which was launched in 2023, recently raised $6 billion from investors in a funding round that valued the company at $40 billion, sources told Reuters earlier.

Musk in February made a $97.4 billion bid with a consortium for the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which was rejected, with OpenAI saying that the startup was not for sale.

As competition in AI intensifies, xAI has been ramping up its data center capacity to train more advanced models, and its supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, called “Colossus,” is touted as the largest in the world.

xAI introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot, in February, as it tries to compete with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek and Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Musk clinched a deal in 2022 to buy X for $44 billion, ending its run as a public company since its 2013 initial public offering, declaring that “the bird is freed” once the acquisition closed.

(Reporting by Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and Sandra Maler)

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