xAI declined to comment. The new share sale comes after Musk, who helped bankroll Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, stepped back last week from his role heading the administration’s cost-cutting initiative. His time at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) came to an end after he clashed with cabinet secretaries and criticised central parts of the Trump administration’s policy agenda. The Tesla and SpaceX chief said he is refocusing on his business holdings after his companies suffered what he called “blowback” over his ties to the president. “Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” Musk wrote on X late last month. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla ... as we have critical technologies rolling out.” Musk has said the combined group will allow his two companies to benefit from combining models, computing power, distribution and talent. For instance, AI developers can better train their models on the social media group’s data and tap its audience. However, he did not disclose further specifics on how the March deal was structured. The opaque transaction allowed X, which had alienated some advertisers after adopting Musk’s hands-off approach to content moderation, to leverage the rising value of xAI. The AI start-up obtained a $45 billion valuation in a $5 billion private funding round late last year. Musk last year granted investors that backed his Twitter acquisition 25 per cent of the shares in xAI. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to take on Sam Altman’s OpenAI and other Big Tech rivals. It quickly unveiled the Grok chatbot and built a supercomputer cluster dubbed Colossus, one of the biggest AI data centre projects in the US. As well as competing with Big Tech and the sometimes rough-and-ready image of Grok, Musk has also agreed partnerships. Last month, Microsoft announced it was making xAI models available to its cloud computing customers, while messaging app Telegram agreed to distribute Grok to its 1 billion users. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025 Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date Sign up to the Business Today newsletter for the latest new and commentary in your inbox Listen to Inside Business podcast for a look at business and economics from an Irish perspective