xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by jprd on Friday March 28, 2025 @05:27PM (#43509956)

This is the kind of crap we learned about when studying the "Robber Baron" era in the US public school system. Well, I mean, we were _supposed_ to learn it - evidently a lot of folks did not.

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by minimaxir on Friday March 28, 2025 @05:33PM (#43510002)

The Robber Baron era was more an instruction manual.

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by dylan604 on Friday March 28, 2025 @05:54PM (#43510210)

Inspiration for why to stay in school so that you too could become a robber baron. Like all history, learn the previous failings so that you can avoid them.

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by latency-guy2 on Friday March 28, 2025 @05:48PM (#43510153)

I don't see any connection to what you're talking about to this. You have to explain.

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by jprd on Friday March 28, 2025 @06:20PM (#43510442)

Thank you, that's a very fair point, and I apologize for my *-centric" viewpoint and such a short quip. That is not what we're aiming for in conversation on this site.

I took a giant shortcut, without providing sources, that was meant to indicate that we are in a situation that closely resembles the "Gilded Age" or "Robber Baron" era in the United States.

I was intending to point towards the actions of individuals in the analogous position of those "Robber Barons", in particular here, Elon Musk.

This dude used the data from Twitter, fed it to xAI (xAI spent lots of CapEx from investment on GPUs). Mix mid-"AI" training on such a ridiculously valuable dataset for free == cool models. Cool models + data stream of Doomscrolling == Higher valuation.

This just seems like a "nepo-baby" hit it big on some meme coin and bailed out Daddy.

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by Hyperboreanal on Saturday March 29, 2025 @01:29AM (#43513015)

You're just using buzzwords. How is this analogous to robber barons at all?

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by fzeroracer on Friday March 28, 2025 @06:07PM (#43510336)

Elon Musk is, essentially, bailing out himself using investor money from another company he runs by assigning a very highball evaluation to the company he's been destroying.

I don't know how you can get closer to the robber baron ideal than being able to distort the market like that.

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by silisili on Friday March 28, 2025 @09:17PM (#43511820)

In fairness, a recent report put X's value at 44b, though I don't have access to FT to read the source material to know why.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-s-...

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Re:xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B by buzzert on Friday March 28, 2025 @08:29PM (#43511513)

Who is stealing from whom in this scenario?

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