xAI acquires X Corp. in an all-stock deal

Background

Elon Musk bought Twitter on 27 October 2022 for about $44 billion^[2]. The platform was later renamed X, and the company that owns it became X Corp. In parallel Musk built an AI company, xAI, whose chatbot Grok was already integrated into X and had real-time access to posts on the platform^[3].

The deal

On 28 March 2025 Musk announced that xAI had acquired X Corp.^[1] He described the transaction as an "all-stock transaction"^[4]. In an all-stock deal no cash changes hands: the owners of the company being bought receive shares in the buyer instead of payment, so X's shareholders ended up holding a stake in xAI rather than being bought out.

Terms

The all-stock deal valued X at $33 billion, stated as $45 billion less $12 billion of debt, and xAI at $80 billion^[1][4]. The $33 billion figure sat below the roughly $44 billion Musk paid for the company in 2022^[2]. Musk said xAI was now worth $80 billion, up from the $50 billion valuation reported in its last funding round in 2024^[4]. The two companies were combined under a single holding company, X.AI Holdings Corp.^[1] Musk said the two companies would "combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent"^[4].

What the combination joined

For a private company, a valuation of this kind is set by the deal itself rather than by a share price on an exchange, so the numbers describe what the parties agreed the businesses were worth at that moment. What the transaction put under one roof was a model and the channel through which people reach it. X was a place where Grok already met users and where text was written and posted continuously; xAI was where the models were built. Musk's own summary of the plan was to combine data, models, compute, distribution and talent^[4].

Data and regulation

Because Grok already ran inside X with real-time access to posts^[3], the merger placed a large flow of user-written text inside the same company as the model trained on it. That arrangement drew regulatory attention: in April 2025 the Irish Data Protection Commissioner opened an investigation into X's use of EU users' posts to train Grok^[3].

Aftermath

Less than a year later, in February 2026, the combined company was itself acquired by SpaceX^[1][5]. Musk announced that SpaceX had acquired xAI in early February 2026, according to New Straits Times reporting dated 3 February 2026^[5]. Reports put SpaceX at about $1 trillion and xAI at about $250 billion, citing a person familiar with the matter^[5]. The social network Musk bought in 2022 had thus passed through two corporate owners in a little over three years, each time as part of a share-based combination rather than a standalone sale.