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Elon Deal Alchemy & The I.P.O. False Spring

News and notes on the biggest deals of the week on Wall Street, for better or worse.

Elon Musk
The two companies are private and majority-owned by Elon, but there are plenty of minority investors at each company. Were they consulted? Photo: Omar Marques/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
March 30, 2025

Despite all the vicissitudes in the market, the Wall Street hype machine was working overtime on Friday. First came Elon Musk’s bizarrely timed announcement, at 5:20 p.m. ET, that he had decided to sell X, formerly Twitter, to xAI, his newish artificial intelligence company best known for Grok, its A.I. chatbot. It was one of the more surreal deal announcements I’ve seen since at least 2018, when Elon announced that he was considering taking Tesla private for $420 a share and had “funding secured” for the deal, which he definitely did not.