On Friday evening, Elon Musk shared that he has sold his social media company, X, to his AI firm, xAI. The sale is valued at $45 billion, which is a bit more than what he originally spent on X in 2022. However, the deal also includes $12 billion in debt.

Musk announced on X that the transaction now places the company’s worth at $33 billion.

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk said in a post on X. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”

Elon Musk has not announced any immediate changes to X, though xAI’s Grok chatbot is already integrated into the platform. He stated that merging the two companies would create “smarter, more meaningful experiences” and revealed that their combined value is now $80 billion.

Since buying X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, Musk has introduced major changes, including laying off 80% of the workforce, altering the verification system, and reinstating accounts that were previously banned. These decisions led to an advertiser exodus and a significant drop in the company’s value.

Although X is now worth less than what Musk originally paid, it has regained some of its lost value. Investment firm Fidelity estimated in October that X had lost nearly 80% of its original worth, but by December, it had recovered to about 30% of its purchase price.

Musk’s sale of X to xAI comes at a time when he is facing scrutiny for his role in the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, raising concerns about whether he is fully focused on his companies, particularly Tesla.

Additionally, Musk has been positioning himself as a key player in artificial intelligence, an area of interest for both the tech industry and the Trump administration. Earlier this year, he led a group of investors in an attempt to buy OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for nearly $100 billion, intensifying his long-running rivalry with OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman.

While it is unclear how merging X with xAI will advance Musk’s AI ambitions, the integration could help xAI introduce its latest AI models and features to a wider audience more quickly.

A significant reversal of X’s fortunesBig advertisers, who had largely abandoned X after hate speech surged on the platform and ads were seen running alongside pro-Nazi content, have begun to return. (X made several pro-Nazi accounts ineligible for ads following advertiser departures.) Amazon and Apple are both reportedly reinvesting in X campaigns again, a remarkable endorsement from two brands with mass appeal.

The brand’s stabilization helped a group of bondholders, who had been deep underwater in their investments, sell billions of dollars in their X debt holdings at 97 cents on the dollar earlier this month — albeit with exceedingly high interest rates — according to several recent reports.

Bloomberg in February reported that X was in talks to raise money that would value the company at $44 billion. It’s not clear what came of those talks and why xAI is valuing X at less than it could reportedly fetch from investors. X needs to pay down its massive debt load, which Musk on Friday said totals $12 billion.

A big part of why X’s valuation has rebounded in recent months is xAI, which X reportedly held a stake in. Last month, xAI was seeking a $75 billion valuation in a funding round, according to Bloomberg.

But the biggest factor in X’s stunning bounce-back is almost certainly Musk himself: Musk’s elevation to a special government employee under President Donald Trump has empowered the world’s richest person with large sway over the operations of the federal government, which he has rapidly sought to reshape.

Investors putting their money into X may be relying more on Elon Musk’s leadership than the company’s actual business performance. Over the past year, Musk has reshaped X into a platform that strongly supports former President Donald Trump, frequently using it to promote his campaign.

With an audience of 200 million followers, Musk has shared controversial views on immigration policies under the Biden administration and often speaks out against progressive movements, using the term “woke mind virus,” which some conservatives use to criticize liberal ideologies.

Now that Trump is back in office and Musk holds a position in the government, X has once again become a major platform for tracking and engaging with the administration. Musk has also used X to communicate updates on policy changes within his Department of Government Efficiency.