Fidelity Marks Up Value of Elon Musk’s X Holdings
Fidelity recently increased the value of its holdings in Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) by 32.37% in October, as reported by Axios. Despite this markup, Fidelity still values the company at a significantly lower amount than the $44 billion that Musk initially purchased it for in 2022.
Axios suggests that this valuation adjustment could be linked to Fidelity’s investment in xAI, a Musk-founded AI startup. Fidelity participated in xAI’s $6 billion Series B funding round earlier this year and also raised the value of its xAI shares by 70% in October. xAI’s chatbot Grok, which was trained on X data, is now accessible to X subscribers. Additionally, there may be a substantial equity stake in xAI held by X.
The decision to mark up the value of X holdings occurred prior to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election in November. Following Trump’s win, there were speculations that Musk would be appointed to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. This event coincided with a surge in traffic to X, as reported by SimilarWeb. Interestingly, the election results also led to a mass exodus of users from X to alternative platforms like Bluesky.