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One Hand Wanks the Other
Musk's X transaction, and other ridiculous bullshit
mister mix
March 30, 2025
Elon Musk sold Xitter to his AI company in a $33 billion all-stock deal on Friday.
Musk said in a post on X that the move will “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” He said the deal values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. Musk, who serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX as well as an advisor to President Donald Trump, bought the site then called Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, gutted its staff and changed its policies on hate speech, misinformation and user verification and renamed it X.
That’s a remarkably frank assessment by the AP, but they left out the good part (Reuters got it): “[Musk] said the combination values ‘xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt)'.“
The only real thing in this transaction is the $12 billion in debt, which Musk owes to a bunch of investors, including a Saudi Arabian named Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who apparently asked for this to happen. In other words, bin Talal took a stake in XAi instead of having Musk pay him his fucking money, as they say in the movies. He doubled down on Musk.
Some Saudi prince with more money than sense might be willing to believe that Elon Musk is an investable proposition, but the rest of us should see this as what it is: a desperate move by a guy who is kicking the Xitter can down the road because he knows that Tesla is going to shit the bed when Q1 earnings come out. His meme stock fanboi investors are still loving the stock, trying to pump it up yet again. But his board members are all dumping the stock.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that Musk is weak. He’s the “richest man in the world” on paper. His cash comes from loans against Tesla. When Tesla inevitably fails, the whole thing comes crashing down. Trump’s attitude towards Musk is at least in part because he perceives that Musk is above him on the only hierarchy Trump cares about: the Forbes 400.
Perhaps Musk has Big Balls and the rest of the DOGErs embedded deeply enough in government that they’ll continue his reign of terror once he’s gone. Maybe they’ll use AI to re-write one of the largest COBOL code bases in the world — the Social Security Administration. (Thanks to TBone for the link).
But maybe not. Maybe when Musk goes the agencies will be able to eject these little brownshirts and start to recover.
I continue to think that anti-Tesla action is some of the best and most effective political action we can undertake at this particular moment. This asinine transaction is just more evidence that it’s working.
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