BREAKING: 53 year-old American tech billionaire Elon Musk’s has officially sold the social media platform, X for $33 billion

Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company bought Musk’s X, the social media platform that used to be called Twitter, for $33bn. This is the latest move in the billionaire’s rapid consolidation of power.

Musk owns many companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, and the all-stock deal revealed on Friday brings together two of them. This could make it easier for Musk to train his AI model called Grok.

In a post on X, Musk announced the deal: “The combination values xAI at $80bn and X at $33bn ($45B less $12B debt”).

“The futures of xAI and X are linked,” he wrote. “Today is the official day that we combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent.”

Neither X nor xAI had a spokesman available right away when asked to comment. A lot of the deal’s details were still not clear, like how investors might be paid, how X’s leaders would fit into the new company, and the possibility of regulatory scrutiny.

Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, said, “This development feels surprising and somewhat unexpected.” “In a way, it marks the end of an era in the rough story of X.”

“The choice of $45bn is not a mistake,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson & Co. “It’s $1bn more than Twitter’s take-private deal in 2022,” and he can share the value of the xAI business with X other partners.

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. He has also increased his power in Washington, DC, by overseeing the Trump administration’s attempts to cut costs as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge. That has also put him in a situation where he might be able to affect the groups that watch over his business.

An investor in both xAI and the new company told Reuters that they were not surprised by the deal because they saw it as Musk tightening his control over his own businesses. The funder didn’t want to be named.

Musk told investors that the two companies had been working together closely and that the integration would lead to even greater integration with Grok. He didn’t ask investors to agree.

A story says that Musk’s xAI startup was founded less than two years ago and just raised $10bn in a funding round that put the value of the company at $75bn.

Musk, who is 53 years old, made a $97.4bn offer with a group to buy OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. The offer was turned down because OpenAI said the startup was not for sale. Musk helped to start OpenAI in 2015 with CEO Sam Altman.

Musk is in direct competition with the well-known OpenAI platform. He has sued his rival in federal court in California to stop them from going from being a non-profit to a for-profit business. Earlier this month, a judge turned down Musk’s request for a preliminary order, which would have stopped the switch.

Putting out a lot of AI software has caused a lot of investment and competition in Silicon Valley. Companies are looking for ways to use software in almost every part of their business in order to be more efficient.

As the AI race heats up, xAI has been expanding its data hub to train more advanced models. Its Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, is said to be the biggest in the world.

The latest version of xAI’s robot, Grok-3, came out in February. The company is trying to compete with OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, and DeepSeek, which is based in China. The X platform can be used to spread xAI goods even further and also provide a live feed of users’ thoughts, screenshots, and other information.

Musk made a deal in 2022 to buy X, which was then called Twitter, for $44bn. This ended Twitter’s time as a public company after its IPO in 2013. Musk said that after the deal finished, “the bird is freed.”

After the acquisition, he fired most of the company’s employees, which caused advertisers to leave the site and revenue to drop quickly. As Musk’s power grows in the Trump government, brands have been coming back to X.

A person who knows about the deals says that the seven banks that gave Musk $13bn in loans to buy X kept the debt on their books for two years until they could sell it all at once last month.

Two people familiar with the issue say that this was possible because, among other things, investors became more interested in AI companies and X’s operating performance got better over the last two quarters.

Espen Robak, founder of Pluris Valuation Advisors, a company that values hard-to-sell assets, said that buyers who bought debt from banks will make money after the merger. “The debt is worth more now, even if it’s not paid off in full.”

On a separate note, a US judge turned down Musk’s request to dismiss a case that said he had lied to former Twitter shareholders by not telling them about his first investment in the company for too long.