"Sometimes self-dealing can be spun as ingenuity. on March 28, Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, had acquired his flailing social media platform, X, in an all-stock transaction. Musk said that the newly combined entity, under the corporate name x.AI Holdings Corp, was valued at $113 billion. Smashing together two of his companies like a kid playing with Silly Putty and hoping something good emerges is a go-to move for Musk."
"Musk has become known for a kind of circular economics-what's been called the "Muskonomy." As Axios's Scott Rosenberg wrote after the X-xAI deal, "these dollars are all just circling the Musk-o-sphere in a slightly different configuration." Whether it's selling carbon credits or stashing Bitcoin on the company balance sheet, financial engineering has proved enormously helpful to Musk and to many other rich-but-overstretched start-up CEOs. Musk has made it a high-wire act."
Elon Musk's xAI acquired the struggling social media platform X in an all-stock deal that valued the combined entity, x.AI Holdings Corp, at $113 billion. Musk has a pattern of merging his ventures, exemplified by SolarCity's 2016 sale to Tesla, and relies on circular financial engineering—dubbed "Muskonomy"—such as selling carbon credits and holding Bitcoin. The merger allows Musk to reclassify X's losses, transfer investor exposure into a high-demand AI startup, and potentially mask financial and reputational damage from the expensive Twitter acquisition. Twitter's $44 billion purchase saddled Musk with debt, damaged ad revenue, and failed subscription monetization.
Read at The Nation
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