Saturday, March 29, 2025

Musk Sells to Musk: xAI Gobbles X


Elon Musk's xAI bought Elon Musk's X for $45 billion.  Musk somehow had time to arrange the deal while running six companies and heading the Department of Ungodly Greedy Executives Biased Against Government (DOUGEBAG).  

This deal occurred within a wider AI context.


Tech giants are reshaping finance and intellectual property law to "deliver on AI's promise."  Google founder Eric Schmidt revealed how AI companies steal copyrighted information to train their models, settling with aggrieved parties after becoming financially successful.

Don't count on Uncle Sam to level the playing field between information creators and usurpers/appropriators.   That enforcement beat has been shuttered.


Musk sold his social fabric-ripping X to his machine generated, empathic AI company, which is doing how much government business?  How might any merger costs be passed on to Uncle Sam?  What kinds of tax benefits does Elon get from Elon selling to Elon?  Rest assured, we will never know.

The deal is an all stock deal between two private companies, reminiscent of a private equity underwriter (PEU) selling an affiliate from one fund to another.  Such deals free up cash to pay earlier investors, even entice them to roll over their money.  So who's rolling and who's getting rolled in this deal?  Musk's PEU sales team knows.

It turns out xAI can analyze credit.  Did the parties in this deal use xAI for that purpose?



It's hard to see because there is nothing transparent about xAI gobbling up X.  

How would xAI value X (its new appendage) or the combined companies?  Would it use:
Mark to market for comparable assets
Mark to model
Mark to fantasy
Mark to AI hallucination
Probably all of the above in a monte carlo analysis.  

To close, give credit where credit is due, except when it is copyrighted material scooped up by voracious AI.  


Remember, there's a lot of anus in there.


But Eric Schmidt never told us that....

I look forward to seeing the picture where self-medicating Elon shakes hands with employee-abusing Elon to close the X/xAI deal.