Summary

Elon Musk announced that his AI startup xAI has merged with his social media platform X in an all-stock deal, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.

Musk stated the merger will combine AI expertise with X’s broad reach.

xAI, launched less than two years ago, competes with OpenAI and has developed the Grok chatbot, integrated with X.

  • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    He added that the merger would, “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach."

    He already owns and runs Xitter as a propaganda tool. Now he’s openly mixing it with his own bots.

    Does anyone else get a really bad feeling about this? I see a lot of comments talking about this financially, but I haven’t seen any comments talking about the disinformation potential that comes with artificially seeding a social media site with his own AI bots. Granted, Grok’s responses have been based (so far), but that’s not guaranteed to last.

    I don’t know exactly what the game plan is here, but the pieces are all laid out for Musk to spread his influence behind AI anonymity. That worries me.

    • _cryptagion [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      No, I’m not getting a really bad feeling about it, any more than I get a bad feeling about the other right-wing social media sites. If they want their own little echo chamber because they don’t feel safe on ones they don’t control, then great. It gets them off of social media the rest of us use.

      As for it reinforcing their bad behavior, that’s going to happen no matter what. These people want to be hateful little shits, and no amount of hand-wringing about misinformation is gonna change that. If Elon wasn’t a nazi, they would just go search out something controlled by somebody who was.

    • Daggity@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Honestly it’s probably to mess with the valuation. It’s propped up partially by Tesla shares iirc.

    • sunflowercowboy@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      Separate the labor force from communications. Allow hateful and xenophobic rhetoeric to form separation and infighting. Infighting is unproductive use of free time.

      While it effectively does nothing, it also reinforces ones own beliefs. Essentially an internet echo chamber without the guise of individualism. It keeps people looking to their family purely for love, growth, and gauging of decisions. However, growth has stopped there for folks.

      It becomes easier to look outwardly for approval for your actions, rather than inwardly for motive of said acts.

  • LupusBlackfur@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Hmm…

    Manipulating stocks between companies you own for fun and profit…

    Sounds pretty Ferengi to me.

    And no accountings shall be held…

    🙄 🤡 🤦‍♀️ 🖕

    • Rookwood@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      Elon has violated securities laws blatantly for years now. Yeah, he won’t be held accountable. And a good half of people still wonder why inequality is such a bad thing.

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      He essentially did the same thing with Solar City a decade ago. Although that was “owned” by his cousins and he bailed them out with by buying it for a few billion.

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    Market cap of Twitter was $41B, Musk overpaid at $44B,

    Fidelity valued it at $9.4B late last year.

    xAI paid $33B for it this year.

    So this is a significantly worse overpay.

    • gamer@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      It’s all to defraud investors. The SEC isn’t going to touch him, and when the earnings report for Tesla is due I bet it’s going to show that the woke libtards were wrong and Tesla sales actually quadrupled in the past 4 months.

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      This is just his left hand paying his right so he can claim Twitter’s value is comparable to what he initally paid for it. He’s getting fixated on people talking about his losses again, and is getting ready to call someone a pedo on main again.

    • booly@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Musk overpaid at $44B,

      Yes, but about $14 billion was financed by debt rather than shares of stock, so the market cap immediately dropped to $30B as a result (enterprise value is market cap + outstanding debt because in a liquidation the debt would be paid out of the assets before the shareholders get anything). So in a sense, the current shares were worth about $30B at the time of the 2022 transaction.

      If this new merger is a private transaction that values X at $33B and xAI at $80B, and everyone agrees, it’s functionally the same as if it were worth $3.3B and $8B.

    • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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      3 days ago

      It went up after the election. Last valuation was back to $44B. It not about Twtter’s valuation, it’s about Tesla stock price. I don’t understand the scam but I’m pretty sure he had to refinance his loan somehow because Tesla stock dropped.

  • demizerone@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I hope I make it out alive of the scam economy. This mother sucker gets away with murder and I have dodge scammers left and right bcz there is no justice or rule of law.

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      The other day i said something along the lines of the economy having a valuation problem and i was assured that that’s inaccurate and only the stock market has a valuation problem. So the economy is fine.

      /s

  • frunch@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Honestly wasn’t sure if they were talking about one of his children when they said xAI

  • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    This is just oligarchs moving their chess pieces around. Expect nothing to come of it. Expect elon to face zero consequences.

    It shouldn’t be hard. If you accept the existence of billionaires you accept that some people shouldn’t ever face consequences and be rewarded for toxic behavior.

  • ElcaineVolta@kbin.melroy.org
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    3 days ago

    oh cool, I just bought my own student loans and it says here that the federal government now owes me triple back what I’ve paid plus interest, isn’t that something?!