Elon Musk‘s latest business transaction was a groundbreaking deal with himself. The special government employee for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed last week that he sold X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, to his artificial intelligence start-up xAI. It was an all-stock deal, said Musk, with xAI valued at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less, $12B debt).
“X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth,” explained the world’s richest person. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.”
The detailed upload continued, “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.”
Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and was promptly overseeing a stream of celebrity exits and a massive surge in the use of the n-word. Whoopi Goldberg, Toni Braxton, and Shonda Rhimes were some of the bold-faced influencers to leave the platform. The X Corp founder rebranded the app from Twitter to X in July 2023.
Since Musk took over, “daily use of hate speech by those who previously posted hateful tweets nearly doubled,” and “the overall volume of hate speech also doubled sitewide,” according to data from researchers at USC, UCLA, UC Merced, and Oregon State University, published by the Los Angeles Times.
A photo illustration of the new Twitter logo on July 24, 2023 in London, England. Elon Musk has revealed today a new logo for Twitter, which constitutes the letter ‘X’ as part of a rebrand of the company.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The Center for Countering Digital Hate found that during the first three months of Musk’s ownership, slurs against Black Americans more than tripled, per TIME Magazine.
Musk launched xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI, the company co-founded by Musk that powers the popular AI bot ChatGPT. After leaving the company, Musk sued OpenAI and claimed “only he can responsibly create A.I. that would not destroy humanity,” in an attempt to purchase it.
Leave a comment