Elon Musk has sold social media site X to his own xAI artificial intelligence company in a $33 billion all-stock deal, the billionaire announced on Friday.
The dumb money are those pouring hundreds of billions into the AI hype. This is .com bubble on steroids.
And sure, AI obviously is becoming an important market, but it will not be the current leaders who will dominate the tech. Like the internet, it’s just too easy to catch up for competitors. Pouring $100B into AI today will only mean you lose out to the $1B startup in 2 years. The incumbents will go broke.
I don’t understand how this gets him free of the loans. My understanding is that he financed $14B of the Twitter purchase with loans secured against Tesla stock. That $14B worth of twitter stock was then owned by Musk and he also had a loan.
This was an all stock purchase, so xAI stock was exchanged for equivalent value of Twitter stock (keep the old name to keep it clear). Now Musk’s twitter stock that he bought with the $14B will become the equivalent value of xAI stock, and he still has the loan that bought it in the first place.
Unless $14B of stock has been sold somewhere to repay the loans they still exist.
Edit: just an addendum. Personally I think stock-for-stock trades should be illegal. Force the parties to move through cash. There’s too much smoke and mirrors hidden by skipping steps. In this case xAI should have had to raise the capital to purchase X. If it can do it through selling stock so be it, but it’s not a wholely internal affair.
To know how exactly it works, we’d need to know details that aren’t public.
But just speculating, if the creditors value the combined xAI+X higher than just X, then there is room to transfer the loan to the new company and away from Tesla.
But whatever the details are, Elon isn’t an idiot when it comes to money. He definitely has advisors who cooked up the optimal way to profit from the AI hype.
And the essence of that is that Tesla shareholders will be left holding the bag, while Elon utiizes X/xAI to capitalize on the hype.
Who do you mean with that? Companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, or do you also include the likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft?
With the former I can see it, but the later also profit from providing the infrastructure (and have other profitable business), so imo those will be just fine.
I definitely see Google/Amazon/Microsoft shedding a huge amount of market cap when the time comes to write-off the 100s of billions they invested the past two years.
They just don’t have any feasible path to recouping those investments.
Sure, they’ll never go fully broke, that’s just a nice word for emphasis.
I actually think Google is going to win this one, they’re the only ones making their own hardware to run their own models. Open ai are starting down that road but they’re years behind.
When you look at the pricing of all the AI companies, Google’s is so much cheaper (orders of magnitude) and they’re not having to pay Nvidia billions to do it.
using AI hype to finance X loans?
Correct.
It’s actually a smart move.
The dumb money are those pouring hundreds of billions into the AI hype. This is .com bubble on steroids.
And sure, AI obviously is becoming an important market, but it will not be the current leaders who will dominate the tech. Like the internet, it’s just too easy to catch up for competitors. Pouring $100B into AI today will only mean you lose out to the $1B startup in 2 years. The incumbents will go broke.
Can’t wait! Gonna stock up on some popcorn lmao
And toilet paper. For whatever reason.
I don’t understand how this gets him free of the loans. My understanding is that he financed $14B of the Twitter purchase with loans secured against Tesla stock. That $14B worth of twitter stock was then owned by Musk and he also had a loan.
This was an all stock purchase, so xAI stock was exchanged for equivalent value of Twitter stock (keep the old name to keep it clear). Now Musk’s twitter stock that he bought with the $14B will become the equivalent value of xAI stock, and he still has the loan that bought it in the first place.
Unless $14B of stock has been sold somewhere to repay the loans they still exist.
Edit: just an addendum. Personally I think stock-for-stock trades should be illegal. Force the parties to move through cash. There’s too much smoke and mirrors hidden by skipping steps. In this case xAI should have had to raise the capital to purchase X. If it can do it through selling stock so be it, but it’s not a wholely internal affair.
To know how exactly it works, we’d need to know details that aren’t public.
But just speculating, if the creditors value the combined xAI+X higher than just X, then there is room to transfer the loan to the new company and away from Tesla.
But whatever the details are, Elon isn’t an idiot when it comes to money. He definitely has advisors who cooked up the optimal way to profit from the AI hype.
And the essence of that is that Tesla shareholders will be left holding the bag, while Elon utiizes X/xAI to capitalize on the hype.
Who do you mean with that? Companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, or do you also include the likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft?
With the former I can see it, but the later also profit from providing the infrastructure (and have other profitable business), so imo those will be just fine.
I definitely see Google/Amazon/Microsoft shedding a huge amount of market cap when the time comes to write-off the 100s of billions they invested the past two years.
They just don’t have any feasible path to recouping those investments.
Sure, they’ll never go fully broke, that’s just a nice word for emphasis.
I actually think Google is going to win this one, they’re the only ones making their own hardware to run their own models. Open ai are starting down that road but they’re years behind.
When you look at the pricing of all the AI companies, Google’s is so much cheaper (orders of magnitude) and they’re not having to pay Nvidia billions to do it.
I actually agree with you, they definitely have the edge, but I still am skeptical that they will be able to maintain their valuation.
I just don’t see a world where most people are coughing up more than $10 a month for AI.
Most people will only use free AI and companies will mostly buy cheap AI.
Running Deepseek locally is basically free. That’s the competition.