Elon Musk's XAI in Talks to Raise Funding Valuing It at $40B | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk's XAI in Talks to Raise Funding Valuing It at $40B

wsj.com

9 pointsbko5 comments

Can someone explain to me how Musk is able to repeatedly turn gambles into gold?

so maybe in theory Twitter/X was profitable for Musk if its spinoff is worth more than the actual service it originated from. It was quite ingenious what Musk had done: he sorta repurposed X/Twitter as an AI company and integrated AI heavily into some of X's features, so now he recouped his loss with the spinoff.

Twitter's value was always the data and influence it had. But it was never able to capture that value and gave it away to openai and others who scraped the data and used it to help build out their LLM. And realistically, even if they had known this was happening, they would still have trouble capturing the actual value from a third party scraping its data.

But by buying it and using it to build a competitive LLM based off the data, he was able to capture the value, at least when both entities are combined.

I never thought about it this way and I'm not sure if this was the actual strategy when he bought Twitter, but it makes sense.

There was no strategy when Musk bought Twitter. He spent 6 months desperately trying to renege on the agreement:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-sues-elon-musk-ho...

Only to finally cave and complete the deal:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-offers-buy-twitter...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

The main strategy for xAI seems to be to extract what supposedly makes the public company Tesla valuable (long promised autonomy) and place it into Musk's private ownership via xAI:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e...

If the shining future of full self-driving is what makes Tesla valuable and Tesla no longer owns that work, then that's a bad outcome for Tesla shareholders.

Tesla does AI in the physical world. Grok is an LLM. Not the same stuff. Tesla continues to work heavily in AI with FSD and Optimus.

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