Billionaire Elon Musk announced on Friday that he has sold social media site X, formerly known as Twitter when he bought it over two years ago, to his own artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI in a $33 billion (€30.5 billion) all-stock deal.

Both companies are privately held, which means they are not required to disclose their finances to the public.

Musk, who is also head of astronautical company SpaceX and carmaker Tesla, said in a post on X that the move will “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach”.

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent,” Musk posted.

“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,” he added.

Musk said the deal values xAI at $80 billion (€74 billion) and X at $33 billion (€30.5 billion).

Ambitions for xAI

The South African-born tech mogul, who also serves as an advisor to President Donald Trump heading the unofficial DOGE department, bought the site then called Twitter for $44 billion (€40 billion) in 2022, gutted its staff, and changed its policies on hate speech, misinformation, and user verification and renamed it X.

He launched xAI a year later.

“Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centres at unprecedented speed and scale,” Musk wrote on X.

Musk announced in December that the AI start-up would be expanding its supercomputer ‘Colossus’ in a bid to take on rivals like OpenAI, increasing the number of graphics processing units (GPUs) in order to develop new AI models at faster rates.

It’s not clear if the move will change anything for X users – xAI already uses data from X user posts to train its AI models and paying X users have access to its AI chatbot, Grok.