xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has acquired social network X, which he owns, for $33 billion, with $12 billion in debt.

The deal, announced by billionaire Elon Musk on March 28, will merge two of the six companies he co-founded or ran. According to Reuters, this could be one of the measures to improve the ability to train Grok AI models.

According to Musk, xAI is currently valued at $80 billion, so the new company has a total value of about $113 billion. “The future of xAI and X is intertwined. We are officially combining the data, models, computing power and talent of the two companies,” Musk said.

Elon Musk at a conference in France in 2023. Photo: Reuters

A spokesperson for X and xAI did not comment on the information.

“The $45 billion figure (33 billion plus $12 billion in debt) is not random. It is $1 billion higher than Musk bought Twitter for in 2022,” said analyst Gil Luria.

The artificial intelligence startup xAI was founded by Elon Musk in July 2023. Increasing competition in the field has forced xAI to expand its data centers to train increasingly advanced models. The company’s supercomputer cluster called Colossus is currently considered the largest in the world.

In February, xAI launched the Grok-3 model, which Musk called “the smartest in the world”, to compete with DeepSeek and OpenAI.

In addition to xAi, Musk is the founder or CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company and Neuralink. He also co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with a number of famous people such as Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Theil. But in 2018, he stepped down as chairman of the company.

In October 2022, the American billionaire bought the social network Twitter for $ 44 billion and renamed it X. For nearly three years, the platform has been volatile and at times its value was estimated to be below $ 10 billion, but it increased again to $ 45 billion earlier this year.

This is not the first time Elon Musk has merged two companies. In 2016, Tesla bought SolarCity for $ 2.6 billion. This solar installation company was founded by his cousin, and he funded and served as chairman of the board. Tesla shareholders at that time filed a lawsuit, arguing that the deal was a bailout of SolarCity. A Delaware judge later ruled in favor of Elon Musk and Tesla, allowing the deal to stand.