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xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

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Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#351

Post by kulahan »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #339
imgabe wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But all the armchair business experts assured me that the value of Twitter had completely tanked since Elon bought it because he’s such a stupid fool who ruins everything, so shouldn’t it be worth less? Just a few months ago everyone was confident it was only worth $8 billion. He valued it at the same price minus debt.

He bought it with stock from another company that has no clear value and is a meaningless hype monster. What is xai going to do that 10 other AI companies aren't going to build, anthropic, openai, etc.

Theoretically the synergy with Twitter could be fantastic in terms of potential value added, if I’m trying to be down to earth. The others have no real foothold in the real world beyond their own services, and users may flock away as AI integrated into their favorite apps etc. become good enough.

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#352

Post by ra7 »

paxys wrote: post #83
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

Can someone please explain this with more words?

Elon bought Twitter for $44B, with a combination of his own money, money raised from investors, and $12B worth of debt secured by his Tesla shares. Since that time Twitter's valuation continued to drop, and by late 2024 several investors (like Fidelity) had marked the company's overall value down to as little as $9B. Now with the recent stock market turmoil and Tesla's massive share price drop, his Twitter loan is in…

What was in it for existing xAI investors to agree to this? Haven’t they lost value here?

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#354

Post by whats_a_quasar »

wraaath wrote: post #309
whats_a_quasar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As best I can tell the deal includes paying off $12 billion of Twitter debt. So that's real money, though that seems like it's basically all of the cash that xAI has raised, so if that's the case that's pretty wild. Edit: I misread, Musk said it's an all-stock deal, so you're right, it's all funny money. I think that means the combined entity is taking on that debt. It's still great for Twitter and bad for xAI invest…

Definitely great for the Twitter investors to be able to convert. I think they took a haircut relative to the 42B that they came in on, as the 45B includes the 12B debt. (42 gets reduced to 33, so 21-22% haircut) xAI also raised 6B in December last year at a 45B valuation, and then in February, reporting was that xAI was trying to raise 10B more at the 75B valuation... so this is where the frothiness of AI helps to m…

Definitely, and a lot of that haircut actually happened in between when the deal was signed and when it closed, too. That was right when interest rates went up and Musk tried to wriggle out of the purchase agreement. So it's a great outcome for Twitter investors, assuming it sticks.

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#355

Post by timewizard »

rayiner wrote: post #182
bhouston wrote: post #29

He has done this move before with Tesla buying Solar City. When you do a deal with yourself you can assign any value you want to assets, it isn’t a competitive process. In the previous case Solar City was dying but its acquisition by Tesla was pitched as a great synergy. https://www.businessinsider.com/solarcity-tesla-energy-belea... There were a few lawsuits from Tesla shareholders about the acquisition regarding se…

You’re burying the lede here, which is that the Delaware Chancery Court rules that Tesla had paid a fair price for Solar City: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-wins-solarcity-tes...

"did not act unlawfully"

and

"paid a fair price"

are two entirely different things.

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#356

Post by yalogin »

This feels like shady accounting. Did the lenders unnecessarily take a cut when they sold some shares recently?

Does the xAI company have investors to be valued at 80 billion? Can someone point me to its investors list or news about a previous funding round?

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#357

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

jimt1234 wrote: post #226
Workaccount2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump pardoned Trevor Milton today, who scammed investors out of millions doing things like his now infamous "rolling a truck down a hill to make it looks functional" demo. Milton donated $1.8M to Trump, and Miltons lawyer's sister is Pam Bondi, the Attorney General. This is nakedly corrupt and a strong signal that you can get away with all manner of financial fuckery if you are on Trumps "good list".

Is it corruption if it's done publicly and no one gives a fuck? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Absolutely..and people care.

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#358

Post by nmca »

rayiner wrote: post #326
marinmania wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP mentions the lawsuits did not succeed Its not like the courts are investment banks with an evaluation arm. They are just judging if anything reaches the point where shareholders were legally harmed, which still gives a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.

Lawsuits can fail for lots of reasons without a decision on the merits. It seems relevant that the reason the lawsuit failed is because the court looked at the fairness of the transaction and determined that Tesla paid a fair price.

This whole thread is true consistent statements that differ only in emphasis.

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#359

Post by thorum »

danso wrote: post #175

Okay, I know Tesla's extremely high P/E ratio is because it's worth is not just tied to cars, and so xAI priced at $20B more than Anthropic does not necessarily mean xAI's AI products are that much better than Anthropic's (e.g. presumably xAI's worth is tied to synergies with Tesla FSD, Optimus, and maybe even Neurolink)...but what products does xAI actually offer, other than Grok being an add-on for premium X subscr…

The OpenAI library is used pretty much everywhere in the LLM world, every serious AI provider has an OpenAI-compatible API, or you can use something like OpenRouter which is also OpenAI-compatible. Standardization is good.

Re: xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

#360

Post by timewizard »

bboygravity wrote: post #142
mdorazio wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much of that is solar instead of Powerwall and Megapack? They don’t break it out in filings unless I missed it.

Exactly. So then why draw conclusions about how SolarCity was a bad deal for shareholders (see parent comments)? There's no substantiation of that either way.

The burden of proof is on the publicly traded company. That they don't make this information clear and obvious speaks volumes.
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