Well, not really. Twitter was his own private property that he bought with borrowed money secured against his Tesla shares. xAI on the other hand is financed by investors whose money he used to bail himself out at a price he made up himself since Twitter is no longer publicly traded. So this is, in my opinion, misuse of investor funds; the picture would be true if xAI used how own money to do this, but no.

On one hand,I think this is serious fraud. On the other, my understanding for anyone investing into his companies is very limited, there are so many red flags on so many levels.

He called the tesla models S3XY, and the 3 is only because Ford was gonna sue him if he used E.

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.

They doubtfully are giving it root access to self-delete.

No because it's a loss, so he'll actually get 10bln in tax credit

If I recall, fidelity wrote off most of its investment in twitter less than a year after the acquisition: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-musks-x-is-now-worth-around-a-fifth-of-the-44-billion-he-paid-for-it-fidelity-says/

Because this way he gets the AI with data that OpenAI couldn't get, and now likely won't get until foreign spies steal it from DOGE and sell it to them.

Behavioral predictions. Squash any dissent before it starts. Welcome to the world of precrime.

He paid it to himself. The value is completely made up.

You have to remember that he wasn't alone in purchasing twitter. He brought others along with him. Now that value of twitter has gone down the tube, I'm sure he's got a ton of unhappy investors on his hand screaming at every quarter's results. He's trying to recoup what they paid for by giving them shares in AI company. And in turn artificially raise the value of the AI company privately as well. It establishes a benchmark for AI company's valuation for later private investors into that company.

xAI has raised maybe $12B from investors. And, supposedly, makes $100M/yr.

The valuations are absurd.

I am more surprised xAI investors approved. Especially for such a high price.

Twitter actually imo had (and still has) quite a bit of value, but that is only to further Elons ideological goals. As a business it is on a downward trend and was never a cash cow to begin with. Comparatively little room for speculation. It's a stagnating or declining business and doesn't generate large profits if any.

xAI on the other hand is pretty much in the same spot as most other ai companies. It has yet to prove to be a highly profitable business, but there is plenty of room for speculation. So as long as the bubble doesn't burst, it has a high valuation.

Which is all that would matter for any Twitter investor that wants to unload his shares. Although I doubt it would be via ipo, but rather in private funding rounds.

xAI's Partners:

A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital, among others.

https://www.glopedia.org/wiki/xai-company