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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

#881
post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happened to Tesla solar roofs? Haven’t heard about those since like 2020. Who actually has one? And Tesla trucks? And full self-driving? And robotaxis? And the private venture around the moon? It’s like everyone just forgets Musk’s announcements that never get delivered on.

Solar roof installs are continuing to grow. Slower than they hoped, but growing. The semi factory will be finished late this year. FSD gets better each month. Obviously there is massive debate if it will be “done” in 1, 2, 5, 10 or never years Robotaxis were announced recently, the plan as announced is for them to be sold in 2026. That has not changed. Looks like they’ll have some kind of driverless taxi service runn…

> Obviously he’s utterly nuts

He takes risks very few others are willing to do, but he is not nuts by any reasonable definition.

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

#882
post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He sold Tesla shares. This is all public, I don't understand the weird speculation...

He had to sell some Tesla shares because he reached the max borrowing limit against his Tesla shares that was allowed. Once he was forced to sell shares he had to pay a lot in taxes. This shows the mega wealthy can pay taxes and not become poor. We should learn from this lesson and tax the .01% of society.

He hit his max borrowing limit? Can we just discuss the facts rather than making stuff up to talk about our favorite narratives?

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

#883
post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happened to Tesla solar roofs? Haven’t heard about those since like 2020. Who actually has one? And Tesla trucks? And full self-driving? And robotaxis? And the private venture around the moon? It’s like everyone just forgets Musk’s announcements that never get delivered on.

Solar roof installs are continuing to grow. Slower than they hoped, but growing. The semi factory will be finished late this year. FSD gets better each month. Obviously there is massive debate if it will be “done” in 1, 2, 5, 10 or never years Robotaxis were announced recently, the plan as announced is for them to be sold in 2026. That has not changed. Looks like they’ll have some kind of driverless taxi service runn…

We were supposed to have full self driving, sleep while it drives you car by 2019, not "the most popular car".

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

#884
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"strongest AI models in existence" [citation needed]

See the leaderboard tab here: https://lmarena.ai . Or just try it. It's excellent. Usage is free of charge so far. Subjectively, on my prompts, it seems substantially stronger than GPT 4o and 4.5. I also like its more "informal" tone, and its willingness to discuss the more controversial topics.

Yep, it’s pretty smart

https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal...

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

#885
Is it weird that if I do not have an account on X, I also have no idea what X actually is? If I go to the home page, it just says "Happening now". No idea what that means though. If I then navigate to the tiny "About" link, I'm not getting any smarter. The "About the company" page takes to a 404. So, unless you know already what X is, you have no obvious way to find out what it is either.

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

#886

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…

The only way to determine fair market value is by having a free market sale.

For example, I had a run-in with the property tax assessor. He assessed my house at an unreasonably high price. I filed a protest, and then had a conversation with him. I offered to sell him the house at a considerably lower price, and he could then flip it for what he assessed it at.

He refused.

I eventually did sell it, for considerably less than the assessed value.

As anyone following stocks knows, the fair market value of a company can vary dramatically minute by minute.

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

#887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought self dealing was usually illegal. I can’t sell my family member my house for $1 for example. But you can do the same thing with companies?

You can sell your house to a family member for $1. (There might be tax implications if you sell a $100,000 property for $1 to avoid gift tax limits or whatever, but that’s a separate issue.) I sold my car to my sister in law for $1. Self dealing is also permissible with companies. Corporate officers and directors must still meet their fiduciary duties to shareholders. And the potential for conflict of interest change…

This is why many states base the sales tax of used cars sales on the market value, not the actual sales price.

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

#888
I’m interested in understanding what happened to the debt. My simplistic understanding was that a bunch of the $13B debt raised for the twitter aq was secured by Tesla stock, with some sort of callable mechanism (which got a bit scary when Tesla stock sank).

I assume with this deal some of that debt got converted to equity ($1B?) and any callable mechanisms got repriced but I cannot find details to figure this out.

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

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Twitter's stock price higher than it was at acquisition?

Twitter doesn't have a stock price. It got taken private in the acquisition.

Also I think Fidelity open puts out statements on the value of Twitter since they are a shareholder. The only recent info I can find on this was an article from last October:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-musk...

Where it states that Twitter is now worth 1/5 of its $44billion price. I highly doubt it re-made up the equivalent value in the span of 6 months. If anything they likely lost more money as advertising sales have plummeted.

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

#890
post #792

So the real story here is that he was in danger of getting margin called on the loan he took to buy Twitter which he financed with TSLA shares as collateral, and this is him moving money around so he doesn't have to face the reality of actually getting margin called amid a sinking TSLA, right?

This makes no sense. He sold a bunch of Tesla stock, used other stock as collateral for a $6B loan and the rest was outside money. He did all this for a $6B loan he could repay no problem?

Virtually all of his wealth is in the stock of his companies.

He can't sell large amounts of stock in one go or it would trigger the price to crater.

Rich people with lots of wealth tied up in stocks will often borrow money from banks at low interest rates and use stock as collateral. This is common knowledge.

If the stock dips too much, the bank can call in the loan/make him put up more collateral, because the original collateral is worth less.

Elon does not have billions in cash or other liquid capital just sitting around. He would need to sell a lot of stock to see that money and that would cause him a lot of problems.

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