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What if everything was planned from the start?
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars.
In 2024, he merged X (new name for Twitter) with Xai, his artificial intelligence start-up, for 45 billion.
At first glance, one might think it was an opportunistic, disorderly, or even impulsive operation. In reality, this sequence forms a precise strategic chain: Musk gave Grok, his AI model, direct access to one of the most massive and dynamic conversational databases in the world.
- 600 million users.
- Billions of texts, images, videos.
- A continuous, real-time, ultra-contextualized flow.
X is no longer a social network, but a commodity!
What Grok consumes has nothing to do with public datasets or news articles.
It’s raw messages, spontaneous exchanges, real-time reactions. A living, unique kind of data — impossible to replicate or buy elsewhere.In an era where conversational data is scarce, Musk owns a private, continuous, self-sustaining pipeline.
That’s a major differentiator compared to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Mistral, which rely on more traditional — and often static — datasets.By integrating X into xAI, Musk is turning a media asset into a strategic resource to train, fine-tune, and calibrate his models.
Exclusive access to data becomes a structural competitive advantage.
This isn’t media logic — it’s extraction logic.
The xAI + X merger is not just an AI project — it's also a financial operation.
X, which lost 70% of its value by the end of 2023, is being absorbed by xAI — a company positioned in a highly speculative and high-valuation sector.
It’s a well-known mechanism: transferring a declining asset into a high-growth vehicle to revive its perceived value.
The valuation doesn’t rely on tangible economic synergies, but on a narrative — a bet on the future, on AI, and on Musk himself.
As early as 1999, Paul Krugman described this growing gap between market valuation and real productivity in The Return of Depression Economics.
Joseph Stiglitz went even further in Freefall, showing how compelling stories are used to justify capital flows disconnected from real value creation.
The dot-com bubble wasn’t an accident. It was a logic.
The xAI + X merger follows the same playbook.
While OpenAI relies on Microsoft, Anthropic on Amazon, and even Google on Android, Musk has locked down the entire stack:
No external links. No dependencies.
It’s a sovereign, fully integrated infrastructure — end to end.
The projected growth of X’s advertising revenue ($2.26 billion in 2025) isn’t driven by surging audience numbers or performance metrics.
It’s rooted in something else: a form of implicit pressure.
Many advertisers — including giants like Apple and Amazon — maintain their budgets on X not for economic reasons, but for political ones.
Presence at the presidential inauguration. Fear of being targeted. Anticipation of retaliation.
Jasmine Enberg, analyst at Emarketer, puts it bluntly: for some corporations, X has become a defensive line item, much like cybersecurity or public relations.
According to a 2023 study by NYU Stern’s Center for Business and Human Rights, 58% of Fortune 500 companies adjust their communication strategy based on the political orientation of platforms.
The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer confirms it: 61% of marketing leaders rank “avoiding scandal” on par with “optimizing sales.
This is no longer marketing. It’s political stabilization.
The acquisition of Twitter wasn’t a failure.It was a stepping stone !
Today, Elon Musk controls one of the few AIs capable of training on a global, large-scale conversational dataset — without relying on any third party.
What he’s building isn’t just a model. It’s a full-stack infrastructure:
— Data to learn
— A platform to distribute
— Compute power to train
— Political influence to protect
Twitter was just the entry point. The real plan is xAI.
