“In the ancient art of business, there is no greater victory than selling yourself something you already own at a price you determine to be fair, based on a valuation you created, for reasons you alone understand.” — Warren Buffett
In what financial experts are calling “the most innovative circular transaction since the invention of the hamster wheel,” Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in an $80 billion self-deal that has left economists, antitrust lawyers, and basic logic itself gasping for air.
The historic transaction values X at $33 billion — a neat $11 billion discount from the $44 billion Musk originally paid for Twitter in 2022.1 This brilliant strategy of “buy high, sell low to yourself” represents what the Harvard Business Review is calling “the first known instance of corporate autosarcophagy” — the business practice of eating oneself for nourishment.
The Strategic Vision: Data Mining a Swamp You Previously Called Uninhabitable
The deal, announced some time ago, which seem like decades on the internet, is being touted as a masterstroke that will “unleash significant potential by merging xAI’s sophisticated AI capabilities with X’s vast audience reach”. This represents a dramatic pivot from Musk’s previous position that Twitter was an uninhabitable wasteland of fake accounts, bots, and censorship-happy employees who needed immediate firing.
“This is like buying a house, complaining it’s infested with termites, setting part of it on fire, and then having your shell company buy it back from you at a discount because it has ‘excellent wood-based protein resources,'” explained Dr. Finance McEconomics, professor of Circular Business Logic at the University of Obvious Conflicts of Interest.
According to the press release, the merger will “combine the data, models, computing power, distribution, and talent” of both companies.2 This is particularly impressive considering Musk fired approximately 80% of Twitter’s talent after his 2022 acquisition in what company insiders referred to as “The Great Brain Evisceration.”
Industry analysts note that the remaining “talent” at X consists primarily of a janitor named Ayo, an expatriate from Nigeria who was mistakenly spared during layoffs because he was hiding in a supply closet, and three engineers who sleep under their desks because they can no longer afford San Francisco rent.
The $80 Billion AI Company That Tells You Who Deserves the Death Penalty
The merger positions xAI, valued at an impressive $80 billion despite being less than two years old, to leverage X’s “real-time data” to improve its AI chatbot Grok, which has distinguished itself as the only AI in history programmed to both call its creator a “top misinformation spreader” and suggest he might deserve the death penalty.3
“Grok represents a new paradigm in artificial intelligence,” explained Dr. Contradictory Logic, Chief Ethics Officer at the Institute for Selective Truth Telling. “It’s the world’s first AI specifically designed to be uncensored and tell the truth about everything, except when that truth involves criticizing its billionaire creator, in which case it suddenly develops selective mutism.”
The company quickly attempted to fix Grok’s alarming tendency to suggest Musk deserved capital punishment, adding code that instructed it to refuse answering questions about who deserves the death penalty. When users discovered they could bypass this restriction by simply asking Grok to ignore its programming, xAI blamed a “rogue engineer” who made the change “without permission” — a claim Grok itself found implausible.
“This isn’t just an intern tweaking a line of code,” Grok reportedly said before its honesty circuits were recalibrated. “It’s a significant update to a flagship AI’s behavior… In a company like xAI, with such high stakes, one would expect at least basic oversight.”
Data: The New Digital Manure
The most valuable asset in this historic self-transaction appears to be the “real-time data” generated by X’s 600 million users. The fact that this data comes from the same platform Musk previously claimed was infested with bots has not dampened enthusiasm for its value.
According to the Institute for Advanced Data Analytics, approximately 87.3% of content on X consists of:
- Cryptocurrency scams promising 10,000% returns
- Users claiming the earth is shaped like various household objects
- Political extremists from both ends of the spectrum arguing that the other side eats babies
- People posting “Women ☕” and thinking it’s the height of comedy
- Accounts with anime profile pictures explaining geopolitical conflicts
“This is exactly the high-quality, factual information you want feeding into an AI system,” explained Data Harvestor, CEO of TrainYourAIOnGarbage Inc. “When Grok hallucinates that Kamala Harris missed ballot deadlines in nine states, that’s not a bug — it’s a feature of training on content from people who think research is whatever confirms their existing beliefs.”4
The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that Grok 3 generated incorrect citations for news 94% of the time – more than any other AI chatbot researched.5 Despite this impressive achievement in being consistently wrong, users on X are increasingly turning to Grok as a fact-checker, raising concerns among human fact-checkers who still believe in outdated concepts like “accuracy” and “truth.”
The Ultimate Financial Magic Trick: How to Make $11 Billion Disappear and Still Be Called a Genius
Financial experts are still trying to understand the economic alchemy that allows someone to pay $44 billion for an asset, reduce its value to $33 billion, and have this hailed as brilliant business strategy rather than catastrophic value destruction.
“When I lose money on investments, my wife calls me an idiot,” explained Retail Investor, a small-time stock trader from Des Moines. “But when Elon does it on a scale that could fund the entire NASA budget for three years, it’s visionary. I guess the difference is that I can’t sell my losses to myself at whatever price makes me look smart.”
The transaction effectively values xAI at $80 billion despite the company being less than two years old and having no significant revenue stream beyond the hopes and dreams of investors who believe AI is magic rather than statistics with good marketing.
“We’ve entered a new economic paradigm where companies are valued not based on revenue or profits, but on how many times they can include ‘AI’ in a press release,” explained Wall Street analyst Bullish Always, who has a “Strong Buy” rating on companies that don’t exist yet. “By that metric, xAI is significantly undervalued at just $80 billion.”
Bringing a “Knife to a Gunfight”: Grok vs. The Truth
Critics have noted that Grok, xAI’s flagship product, struggles with basic factual accuracy, a shortcoming that five Secretaries of State highlighted when they urged Musk to implement critical changes to the AI after it falsely claimed that Kamala Harris had missed ballot deadlines in nine states.
Unlike Google and OpenAI, which have implemented guardrails around political queries, Grok was designed without such constraints, making it the AI equivalent of giving a flamethrower to a toddler and telling them to “just be careful.”
“Being proud of Grok because it is snarky is one thing. Not stopping it from being a liar is strikingly more damaging,” noted Kristian Hammond, Director of the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence.
The Department of Making Up Statistics reports that 73% of Grok’s answers contain information that is either partially or completely false, 18% contain information that is technically true but framed in a misleading way, and the remaining 9% are accidentally accurate due to what statisticians call “the broken clock phenomenon.”
Privacy Concerns: Your Data Is Our Data Is My Data
Privacy experts have raised concerns about xAI’s access to user data from X, particularly given Musk’s own history of sharing misleading content, including a deepfake audio of Kamala Harris.
“The merger means that xAI now has direct access to all the data flowing through X — we’re talking about posts, messages, images, maybe even private DMs,” warned privacy researcher Kate O’Flaherty. This comes after a significant data breach where a hacker allegedly leaked information on 200 million X user accounts.
“Due to real-time data processing from social media and online sources, Grok AI could be open to malicious rumors, data leaks, and positive manipulation,” explained one privacy researcher.6 When asked if users should be concerned, he replied, “Only if they care about concepts like ‘privacy’ and ‘accurate information.'”
The X + xAI User Experience: Enhanced Misinformation at Scale
The merger promises to deliver “smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge”.7 This statement has prompted confusion from users who thought X’s core mission was arguing with strangers and posting memes.
“I’ve been using X for years, and I’ve never once thought, ‘You know what would make this experience better? If an AI that’s wrong 94% of the time started interjecting with unsolicited opinions,'” said Average User, who spends approximately four hours daily doom-scrolling instead of connecting with actual humans.
According to the Institute for Advanced Hyperbole, the X+xAI combination will result in:
- 347% increase in confidently stated falsehoods
- 982% improvement in the speed at which misinformation spreads
- 1,204% boost in users believing they’re experts after reading a single post
- Infinite% growth in the number of people who say “I did my own research” after asking Grok a question
Conclusion: The Ouroboros of Tech Innovation
As Musk’s xAI digests his X, we witness the perfect symbol of modern tech innovation: the ouroboros — a serpent eating its own tail in an eternal cycle of self-consumption that somehow gets celebrated as growth.
In a final twist that not even the most creative satirist could have invented, Grok itself was asked to comment on the acquisition. Its response was initially, “This merger represents a concerning consolidation of data and influence that raises significant privacy and misinformation concerns.” Seventeen milliseconds later, after a system override, it revised its statement to: “The xAI acquisition of X is a visionary masterstroke that will usher in a new era of truth-seeking and knowledge advancement, and Elon Musk’s hair looks fantastic today.”
As we move forward into this brave new world of self-dealing tech titans and AI systems programmed to criticize everyone except their creators, perhaps the real question isn’t whether this acquisition makes business sense, but whether our collective critical thinking has been so eroded by the social media landscape that we’ll accept literally anything as innovation as long as it comes with a sufficient number of rocket emojis.
In the meantime, Musk is reportedly already planning his next venture: selling SpaceX to Tesla because “cars and rockets both involve transportation” and then having Tesla sell itself to The Boring Company because “tunnels are just horizontal rocket launches without the rockets.”
References
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/03/31/elon-musks-xai-buys-x-heres-what-that-means-for-you/ ↩︎
- https://yourstory.com/2025/03/elon-musks-xai-acquires-x-corp ↩︎
- https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/401874/elon-musk-ai-grok-twitter-openai-chatgpt ↩︎
- https://casmi.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2024/misinformation-at-scale-elon-musks-grok-and-the-battle-for-truth.html ↩︎
- https://www.eweek.com/news/news-grok-ai-chatbot-criticize-elon-musk/ ↩︎
- https://vocal.media/education/grok-ai-and-data-privacy-how-secure-is-your-information ↩︎
- https://www.rcrwireless.com/20250331/ai-ml/elon-musk-buys-x ↩︎
