I don’t understand the point of this stuff, Musk already has infinite money why does he need to play shenanigans with shuffling things between his various holdings?
> Last year, SpaceX agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI as part of the startup’s $5 billion equity fundraising, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
Sometimes you just need to get the founders in a room together to hash things out and magic can happen.
That makes zero sense. The loans he took out are personal loans. He can't shuffle those into the companies, and all the other purchase money came from investors not as debt.
This makes sense based on his recent talk about putting solar powered AI data centers in space. I was expecting this announcement soon and it makes perfect sense if that's the goal.
Buying Twitter was a financially disastrous decision. It had reportedly lost at least 80% of its value [1]. The loans were secured against Tesla shares so there was the real risk of a margin call and a forced sell off.
And then along came xAI where a bunch of people gave Elon money and he "merged" Twitter and xAI, basically siphoning off billions of the investment funds ti bail himself out. If securities law had teeth, he probably should've gone to prison for this.
At the ssame time, why weer people giving this charlatan man-child billions to invest in AI?
The problem is they weren't buying AI. IMHO they were buying a seat at the table and an influence in the administration, a bit like the Saudi sovereign fund's "investment" in Jared Kushner.
Thing is, this isn't the first time he's done this. Elon used one of his companies (Tesla) to buy another of his companies (SolarCity) who was essentially insolvent but owed a lot of money to a third of Elon's companies (SpaceX). There was a lawsuit but it was dismissed. If you're sufficiently wealthy, the law basically doesn't apply to you [2].
I knew before even clicking on this that the justification would be orbital data centers (and it is). They make no sense becaus eof launch costs, cooling and cosmic rays and solar radiation.
Is this the continuation of the Twitter buyout shell game?
> Buying Twitter was a financially disastrous decision. It had reportedly lost at least 80% of its value [1]. The loans were secured against Tesla shares so there was the real risk of a margin call and a forced sell off.
No there wasn't any risk of a margin call he instantly leveraged Twitter to take on massive amounts of the debt itself. The purchase of Twitter was much more like a LBO than anything else.
> At the ssame time, why weer people giving this charlatan man-child billions to invest in AI?
Because he's basically got the midas touch as far as investors are concerned. His company don't even need to be "successful" for him to figure out some way to 10x their money.
> would give fresh momentum to SpaceX’s effort to launch data centers into orbit as Musk battles for supremacy in the rapidly escalating AI race against tech giants like Google, Meta and OpenAI.
Still haven't seen a successful PoC datacenter in orbit. If you own the rockets, maybe get that done tomorrow? I do assume your investors will want one working before they dump even more cash into the idea. But what do I know.
A lot of people are getting very irate over this, but I think this is more or less fine. Everyone in these companies know perfectly well they're just part of the Elon Musk extended universe. He hasn't behaved like they're separate companies for quite some time. Was it a financially wise move for xAI to buy twitter? Well, no, but everyone in twitter was quite happy they got a price that was the same as the inflated original purchase price, so that was quite clear, and everyone involved in xAI is the Elon train so they've got nothing to complain about and if you squint the rationale of training data and distribution kind of makes sense. With SpaceX again, it's a private company, if they want to go along with Elon Musk's non-economic moves because they want to be onboard the Elon train? Sure, why not, they've followed him this far and he genuinely has delivered an incredibly ambitious feat with SpaceX.
I think the only exception is Tesla where it's a public company and Musk has an obligation to the shareholders, but honestly, this seems like it would be SpaceX bailing out Tesla & xAI, not the other way around.
I guess what I'm saying is "Who is actually invested in any of these Elon Musk ventures who isn't happy to give Musk a blank cheque to operate however he wants?"
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[ 0.42 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] threadWhat does the process look like, exactly?
Sometimes you just need to get the founders in a room together to hash things out and magic can happen.
What are we doing here
https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
And then along came xAI where a bunch of people gave Elon money and he "merged" Twitter and xAI, basically siphoning off billions of the investment funds ti bail himself out. If securities law had teeth, he probably should've gone to prison for this.
At the ssame time, why weer people giving this charlatan man-child billions to invest in AI?
The problem is they weren't buying AI. IMHO they were buying a seat at the table and an influence in the administration, a bit like the Saudi sovereign fund's "investment" in Jared Kushner.
Thing is, this isn't the first time he's done this. Elon used one of his companies (Tesla) to buy another of his companies (SolarCity) who was essentially insolvent but owed a lot of money to a third of Elon's companies (SpaceX). There was a lawsuit but it was dismissed. If you're sufficiently wealthy, the law basically doesn't apply to you [2].
I knew before even clicking on this that the justification would be orbital data centers (and it is). They make no sense becaus eof launch costs, cooling and cosmic rays and solar radiation.
Is this the continuation of the Twitter buyout shell game?
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593
No there wasn't any risk of a margin call he instantly leveraged Twitter to take on massive amounts of the debt itself. The purchase of Twitter was much more like a LBO than anything else.
> At the ssame time, why weer people giving this charlatan man-child billions to invest in AI?
Because he's basically got the midas touch as far as investors are concerned. His company don't even need to be "successful" for him to figure out some way to 10x their money.
What a load of absolute horseshit. At what point do people start opening their eyes?
Still haven't seen a successful PoC datacenter in orbit. If you own the rockets, maybe get that done tomorrow? I do assume your investors will want one working before they dump even more cash into the idea. But what do I know.
I think the only exception is Tesla where it's a public company and Musk has an obligation to the shareholders, but honestly, this seems like it would be SpaceX bailing out Tesla & xAI, not the other way around.
I guess what I'm saying is "Who is actually invested in any of these Elon Musk ventures who isn't happy to give Musk a blank cheque to operate however he wants?"