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Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me he's just scammed xAI investors, who thought they were investing in an AI company, into bailing him out of his failed Twitter purchase - they are now the idiots who paid $44B for Twitter (recently valued by Fidelity at $10B), and Musk gets his money back.

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I think xAI investors were enthusiastically buying a ticket on the Elon rollercoaster

These xAI investors are not regular paycheck people. If they aren’t happy, this deal would not have happened. If they lose money, who cares.

“Musk did not ask investors for approval but told them that the two companies had been collaborating closely and the integration would drive deeper integration with Grok.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/29/elon-musk...

can you cite your source? What leverage did Elon give the investors when he sold them shares?

No source, just speculation. I think my main point is that these aren’t regular people that we need to feel sorry for or rise up in arms to defend.

You can be against fraud in general without feeling sympathy for the particular victims. I know I am.

Why assume fraud?

Usually a safe assumption with Musk. I believe his kind call it "pattern recognition."

Unlike the shareholders of a company being acquired, the shareholders of an acquiring company do not need to be asked prior to the company making an acquisition.

IANAL, but this might be brought to court, if the company mission (as defined in their operating agreement) is to invest in AI, then buying X is not in the best interest of the company and not what the investors signed up for. It could be fraud.

Every AI company is buying access to data sets or sources of data.

So your justification rests on the theories that a) Musk (Twitter) was denying Twitter data access to Musk (xAI), and b) Twitter data - a firehose of ill-informed flamewars and bot responses - would provide some incremental benefit to training a frontier model.

A) considering the deals with Reddit and other content sources are paid it might not look wise to give it to a company you own for no consideration

B) I never said it was a good idea or anything. Just proposing what thought process happened.

Am a lawyer, this is an incredibly silly and unlikely thing to suggest for a for-profit company set up on behalf of an even mildly sophisticated party in the USA.

Nearly ever such company is "limited" to engage "in any lawful activity" so as avoid exactly this issue.

What is iAnal? Does it mean what I think it means?

IANAL stands for "I am not a lawyer"

This reminded me of this one time my father used the term "annales" which in french apparently means "past exams" or something :P

Sorry to disappoint you, but it means "I am not a lawyer"

Then there must be a UANAL

Being actively not a lawyer.

I thought I also heard that the people who agreed to buy Twitter's debt got the deal sweetened with some XAi stock.

Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete bloodbath it should have been.

Is there currently a better use of the money? They can’t just double their GPU count.

Fidelity valuing at $10B is ancient outdated news no longer reflective of reality, the value had skyrocketed in recent months, given the profits which now exceed profits as a public company. [1] [2]

In fact, Twitter debt is selling at 97% of value, indicating high confidence in the company. [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-high-price-114...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-value-on-wall-street-is...

> Twitter debt is selling at 97% of value, indicating high confidence in the company

I helped some friends buy this debt. It has nothing to do with Twitter’s strength as an enterprise, but Musk’s brand as a political one. There is a great book on 90s Russia before Putin took power—the pre-Berezovsky playbook looks like the way to go in America right now.

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