[intuitionist]

The outside investors in X made a profit on paper; Twitter was bought for $44B but the deal was financed with like $31B in equity and $13B in debt. It’s not a big profit (in fact it’s worse than you would have done in T-bills), and of course they’re swapping one illiquid and hard-to-value asset for another, but Elon isn’t giving them a 25% haircut at all.

[echelon]

Even if he made the Twitter investors whole, I wonder how the investors in xAI feel.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

They feel great, because he just magically turned a ~50% loss in Twitter into a ~50% return in xAI and a ~0% loss in Twitter.

Of course, you can't buy $20B worth of mangoes for $40B worth of Mango Holding Company stock and then suddenly make your mango-holding business worth twice as much money.

But you can pretend!

Private valuations, especially VC-funded companies, have been nonsense for decades. Elon is just exploiting that egregiously.

[chrisco255]

They're mostly the same investors.

[johannes1234321]

They just wait for the next round of this. Maybe SpaceX will require more AI? Or Tesla?

[zahlman]

Isn't Twitter's stock price higher than it was at acquisition?

[kelnos]

As the sibling pointed out, private companies don't have stock prices. But I've read estimates that Twitter is worth less $10B now, so less than a quarter what Musk paid for it.

[ceejayoz]

Twitter doesn't have a stock price. It got taken private in the acquisition.