🚀 $1.25T: SpaceX Takes xAI

Plus Apple's $2B acquisition and Zuckerberg's 2026 vision

February 04, 2026

Reading time: 5 minutes

🗞️In this edition

  • SpaceX Acquires xAI in $1.25 Trillion Merger Ahead of Historic IPO

  • Sponsored: Become an AI consultant and deliver ‘ROI with AI’ to your clients

  • Apple Buys Audio AI Startup Q.ai for $2 Billion to Read Your Lips

  • Zuckerberg Says 2026 Is the Year AI Delivers Personal Superintelligence

  • In other AI news –

    • Brands Spent $8M Each on AI Super Bowl Ads. They All Flopped.

    • Qualcomm CEO Reveals Who Will Win the AI Device War

    • This AI Just Replaced an Entire Sales Team and Closed More Deals

  • 4 must-try AI tools

Three moves this week that rewrite the rules of what comes next.

One visionary just merged two of his most ambitious companies into a $1.25 trillion bet that computing belongs in space, not on Earth. Another spent $2 billion to buy technology that reads your face when you're not even speaking. And the third announced 2026 as the year AI stops being a feature and becomes the entire point.

Each decision reveals where power is actually moving. Not in the products being announced, but in the infrastructure being locked in while everyone else debates whether AI is overhyped.

The pattern shows who's positioning for control and who's scrambling to catch up. The difference matters. A lot.

This edition breaks down what actually happened and why it changes everything.

What's happening:

SpaceX acquired xAI on Monday in a deal that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion, making it the largest merger of all time. The acquisition unites rockets, satellites, social media platform X, and the Grok chatbot under one company.

The deal structured as a share exchange converts one xAI share into 0.1433 SpaceX shares. xAI shares valued at $75.46 and SpaceX at $526.59, with SpaceX valued at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.

Musk announced the merger positioning space based data centers as the only solution to AI's massive power demands. SpaceX filed Friday with the FCC requesting permission to launch one million satellites to create orbital data centers powered by constant solar energy.

The combined company is preparing for an IPO later this year that could be the largest in history. Bloomberg reports the June IPO is timed with Musk's birthday and a planetary alignment.

Why this is important:

This is Musk consolidating his empire before going public, and the $1.25 trillion valuation tells you Wall Street believes space based computing is real. Whether it works or not, investors are betting billions that it does.

Think about what this merger actually solves. xAI burns cash competing with OpenAI and needs SpaceX's revenue and infrastructure. SpaceX needs AI to justify launching a million satellites and make orbital data centers more than science fiction.

The timing matters more than the technology. xAI raised $20 billion last month at a $230 billion valuation, then immediately got acquired for $250 billion. That twenty billion premium in one month shows how desperate Musk is to lock in funding before the IPO.

Space based data centers are theoretical and unproven. Musk is asking investors to fund a concept that doesn't exist yet, and the market is rewarding that bet because energy costs on Earth are real and getting worse. Whether orbital computing works is less important than whether people believe it might.

Comments from the editor:

The one million satellite request came three days before announcing the merger. That's not a coincidence, that's building a narrative for investors before the IPO.

Musk already merged xAI with X last year in a $33 billion deal. Now he's rolling that into SpaceX. This is the third consolidation in 18 months, each one creating a bigger valuation for the same underlying assets.

Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI last week, despite shareholders voting no in November. Now that investment becomes SpaceX stock after the merger, creating circular financing across Musk's companies that makes it impossible to tell where money actually originates.

The IPO could value the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, making it worth more than Amazon or Google. That valuation assumes orbital data centers work, Starship launches regularly, and AI demand keeps growing forever. If any of those assumptions break, the whole structure collapses.

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Source: Reuters

What's happening:

Apple acquired Israeli startup Q.ai for $2 billion, making it the company's second largest acquisition ever after buying Beats for $3 billion in 2014. The startup developed technology that reads facial muscle movements to understand whispered or silent speech.

Q.ai filed patents showing the technology working in headphones or glasses, detecting facial skin micro movements to enable communication without talking. The system can also monitor heart rate, respiration, and emotions through facial analysis.

The company's 100 employees join Apple, including CEO Aviad Maizels who previously founded PrimeSense. Apple bought that company in 2013 and used its 3D sensing technology to create Face ID for iPhones.

Apple's chip chief Johny Srouji said Q.ai pioneers new ways to use imaging and machine learning. The acquisition comes as investors pressure Apple to make big AI moves while competitors pour billions into models and infrastructure.

Why this is important:

This is Apple admitting Siri is broken and buying the fix instead of building it. The company watched Meta launch AI glasses and OpenAI announce voice wearables for late 2026, then spent $2 billion to catch up.

Think about what silent speech technology actually enables. You could control devices, send messages, and make calls without speaking out loud. That makes sense for AirPods and Vision Pro, but it also means Apple wants sensors reading your face constantly to detect micro movements.

The timing reveals desperation. Apple closed a deal with Google to use Gemini models while simultaneously buying Q.ai, showing the company doesn't know whether to build, buy, or partner its way into AI leadership. Doing all three at once means none of them is working well enough on its own.

Maizels sold his last company to Apple and it became Face ID. Now he's selling another one focused on facial recognition technology. That pattern tells you Apple trusts this specific team to deliver hardware AI features, and the $2 billion price tag says they need it shipping in products soon or risk losing the wearables race entirely.

Source: Social Media Today

What's happening:

He announced projects that once required entire teams can now be handled by one talented person with the right AI tools. Meta is flattening teams, investing in AI native tools, and giving more power to individual contributors.

Zuckerberg said feeds will evolve into a third era where AI generated content joins posts from friends and creators. The company already created 20 billion AI images in its Vibes app and expects an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive.

Meta reorganized into Meta Superintelligence Labs, pulling together research, product work, and foundation models. The company hired top AI talent from OpenAI, Google, Apple, and Anthropic, and spent $14.3 billion acquiring Scale AI along with its CEO Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer.

Why this is important:

This is Meta admitting social media as we knew it is over. When the CEO talks about personal superintelligence and flattening teams, he is describing a company that believes AI replaces the need for most human work.

Think about what happens when one person with AI tools can do what used to take a whole team. That is not productivity, that is job elimination dressed up as efficiency. Meta already cut Reality Labs after it lost $6 billion last quarter while the company made $22.8 billion in profit from AI powered ads.

The feed evolution is code for replacing human posts with machine generated content. Friends came first, then creators, now algorithms that make content specifically designed to keep you scrolling. The 20 billion AI images in Vibes prove people will consume synthetic content when it is packaged correctly.

Zuckerberg spending $135 billion on infrastructure tells you this is not an experiment. This is the biggest bet any social media company has ever made, and the market rewarded it with a 10 percent stock jump in one day because Wall Street believes AI replaces expensive humans with cheap machines.

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Space infrastructure. Silent speech monitoring. Personal superintelligence replacing human work.

These aren't predictions anymore. They're investments at a scale that forces the rest of the industry to follow or disappear.

What connects them is consolidation. Musk merging companies before the biggest IPO in history. Apple buying its way into wearables after watching competitors move first. Zuckerberg spending more than any social company ever has because the alternative is irrelevance.

The transformation isn't gradual. It's happening in billion-dollar moves that compound faster than anyone can respond to.

Pay attention to who's consolidating power right now. That's the only thing that will matter in twelve months.

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