It frowned upon when Elon Musk announced that AI startup Xai had acquired social media company X (formerly known as Twitter). But in many ways, trading makes sense. Xai’s chatbot Grok has already been deeply integrated with X, and X has a financial inspiration, with Musk needing a way to make his $44 billion Twitter acquisition look like an AGI-dominated strategic play.
He also pointed out a deeper look at how the mask empire works. Investing in any of his companies is not a quick return on investment. It is to buy the mysticism around musk and swallow the entire story of success that exceeds the actual number.
Some call it glyft. But the market becomes increasingly tolerant, especially when the thread that connects the story is one of the president’s right hand.
“Elon’s companies today are all basically one company,” Yoni Rechtman, principal of Slow Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It’s all already Elon, Inc. People working at multiple companies at the same time. They share a web of capital connections. They have business with each other and he effectively treats everything as one company.
The idea among musk bulls like Ron Baron, founder of investment management firm Baron Capital, is that “what everything (the mask) does is helping everything else he does.” Other companies under Musk’s control include Tesla, SpaceX, the boring company, and Neuralink. Some of them share resources.
“When (Musk) bought Twitter, did he have the opportunity to have this data and think the license was great value? When he decided to go to Mars on SpaceX, did he really think that there was a real opportunity for the internet around the world at first? You can earn tens of billions of dollars of profit (…), you have all the businesses in the world.
Baron Capital invests in the entire mask ecosystem, an example of investor crossovers among a variety of billionaires. Companies such as 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, DFJ Growth, Fidelity Investments, Manhattan Venture Partners, Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital also hold positions across Musk’s corporate web.
It brings us back to Xai-X trading. Experts questioned how the acquisition could rate X at $33 billion, how to value X at $80 billion, considering its valuation value was more than tripled just a few months ago, and AI companies reportedly have little way to earn money. However, evaluations are not always based on what exists today. Rather, they take into account what investors want – and that’s especially true when it comes to mask ventures.
Look at Tesla. Electric car makers have been treated like high-tech stock for many years, despite the fact that Tesla has a margin for automakers based on the belief that one day it will unleash groundbreaking autonomy in the form of self-driving cars and humanoid robots.
“The reason why (Tesla’s) stocks trade with 80x revenue and 25x revenue is because people are betting in the long term. It’s not about what will happen with this year’s numbers.” “It’s one of Elon’s superpowers and this ability to make investors engage for the long term.”
Munster’s company invests in X, Xai and Tesla. Assuming that Mask can actually offer the pledge to marry X’s real-time data trobe and distribution platform and Xai’s infrastructure and AI expertise, it’s exactly the type of all-in-mask supporter who can benefit most from transactions like Xai Buying X.
Of course, integrated value also has a higher risk.
Dan Wang, a professor at the Columbia School of Business, told TechCrunch that research is at the intersection of business and society, and that the biggest immediate risk factor for investors is the ongoing litigation X faces from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The lawsuit accuss Musk of being a misleading investor by delaying disclosure of previous investments on Twitter. The SEC claims this has allowed Musk to artificially buy more Twitter stocks at lower prices.
Wang listed several other risk considerations, including anti-competition and user privacy concerns, particularly regarding the way X quietly chose all users to collect data for AI model training. The opt-in change has already raised the outrage of one regulator, the Irish DPC, which has already launched an investigation into a potential violation of European GDPR law.
“Another kind of risk here is that there is no consensus framework for how the AI market is regulated, but we’ve already seen traces of this in Europe and until recently in California,” Wang said. “Many of these frameworks relate to how AI models are deployed in terms of distribution of AI models (…) to provide the responsibility of the companies creating AI models and access to those models.”
Musk may also simply lose interest in the project, Letchman said.
“I think that’s what a lot of Tesla shareholders are feeling right now,” he said.
When asked about some of these risk factors, Munster appeared to be no positive. He suggested that they were not important given the Xai value proposition, for example, and the enormous potential of becoming the dominant player of AI.
“We are betting on the company about our belief that AI will be more transformative than people think,” he said. “What is the value (…) of the four brains that the world runs through?”
Rechtman said the mask bull is not blindly loyal, but simply trusts the musk superpower in itself, “to his will” and “to his will” in a way that allows him to do things and build a business that no one else can.
“The people in these businesses have just become long-time Elons and they will continue to go to long-time Elons,” Rechtman said. “So it’s not surprising to me that they keep telling you that the emperor is dressed.”
There is no purchase to Musk’s more speculative bets like X, so one way to increase Muskverse’s investment opportunities is, according to Rechtman.
“SpaceX is authentic and never publicly available,” he said. “So the only way to invest in SpaceX is to access your bids, and the only way to access your bids is to be in Elon’s good bounty.”