Elon Musk is, among other things, the king of the related party transaction. Almost a decade ago, Tesla bought SolarCity, a clean energy start-up backed by Musk and his brother. Now, the tech billionaire is merging xAI and X, formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock deal. This values the former’s equity at $80bn and the latter’s at $33bn, for a combined total of $113bn. 

From an industrial standpoint, crunching these companies together is probably sensible. One may be a mature social network and the other a rocket-ship artificial intelligence start-up. Yet xAI’s Grok chatbot feeds off the social media’s data, and Grok is tirelessly flogged to X users.

The huge valuations ascribed to the two companies may have raised eyebrows. But both groups are privately held and tightly controlled. The numbers, in this case, are less informative than those of public companies derived by daily trading with liquidity.