Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, has officially acquired social media platform X (formerly Twitter), positioning the new entity as a unique hybrid media-tech business.

The power of one: The acquisition aims to fully integrate xAI’s advanced models—including its conversational AI, Grok—into the X platform, which boasts over 600 million active users. The merger creates a potentially powerful end-to-end ecosystem combining real-time audience data, AI-powered content generation, and native distribution, all under one roof.

Musk himself emphasized the strategic vision, posting: "xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent." The deal, structured as an all-stock transaction, values the combined company at $113 billion.

Revenue growth: As third-party cookies are phased out and privacy regulations tighten, platforms with deep first-party data and integrated AI have a potential advantage. X's growing ad business — projected to hit $1.31 billion in U.S. revenue in 2025 — is already benefiting from renewed advertiser interest.

How we got here: Musk acquired X in 2022 for $44 billion, initiating a controversial and transformative period marked by workforce cuts, feature overhauls, and a rebrand to 'X' — his vision of an 'everything app' combining social media, payments, and AI. Musk launched xAI in July 2023 as an artificial intelligence research lab positioned as a challenger to OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.