2025-03-29, When power buys itself

Yesterday, it was announced that xAI is acquiring X. That sentence is easy to skip past. It sounds like corporate rearranging, maybe a branding pivot, maybe Musk doing Musk things again. But the thing is—X is already owned by Elon Musk. And xAI is also owned by Elon Musk. So when a company owned by one person gets bought by another company owned by that same person, that just smells off.

It’s not illegal. It’s not even that unusual, structurally speaking. But it’s a moment worth sitting with, because it reveals something more important than the headline itself: the fact that this kind of move doesn’t register for most people—emotionally or cognitively. There's no shared language for what this is, or what it does.

That absence of interpretation is the story.

We’re watching the formation of power in real time. Not just financial power, not just algorithmic control—governance. The ability to set rules, shape discourse, and define what knowledge is. But we’re watching it through tools built for another era. It’s like trying to explain a supercomputer using 19th-century steam engine diagrams.

And in that mismatch—between what’s happening and what we can describe—we miss it. Or worse, we misclassify it as noise, eccentricity, or personal branding.

So what is this move?

Two Forms of Control, Now Merged X (formerly Twitter) is, structurally, a platform for speech. It governs what is visible, what is prioritized, who can be heard. It sets the tone and tempo for cultural and political discourse. Whether it does that well or poorly is beside the point—the point is, it does it.

xAI is a company designed to build general-purpose artificial intelligence, trained on data from the world—including, presumably, X itself.

So what we’re looking at isn’t a business deal. It’s the fusion of two governing systems:

One that captures and curates human discourse in real time.

One that turns human discourse into machine-readable, predictive modeling.

Together, they form a loop:

The public speaks on the platform.

That speech trains the AI.

The AI generates new speech, moderation strategies, content sorting mechanisms.

The platform changes as a result.

This is recursive governance. It’s not just top-down control. It’s a closed loop where human behavior is observed, modeled, and then re-intervened on through both content visibility and algorithmic shaping. And it’s all contained within a single ownership structure.

This Isn’t Business Strategy. It’s a Sovereign Move. The legal system still treats companies like discrete, understandable entities. You can regulate Twitter. You can regulate an AI lab. But what do you do when a platform becomes the epistemic infrastructure for training machines, and those machines begin shaping the discourse on the platform?

What do you do when the user base is also the training data, and the product being sold isn’t a service, but a model of the world?

There are no existing governance tools for that. The law doesn’t know what to call it. Regulation isn’t built to see it. And because there’s no clear moment of harm—no oil spill, no fraud, no whistleblower—the public doesn’t recognize it either.

That’s the genius of it. There’s no event. Just a shift in shape.

Structural Opacity Is the Point What makes this move powerful isn’t that it hides control—it erases the boundaries where control used to be legible.

In the past, we could say: this company provides infrastructure, this one provides content, this one sets the rules. Now, all those categories are collapsing. X is infrastructure, content, discourse, and behavior. xAI is the layer that interprets, simulates, and predicts from that behavior.

When those two collapse into each other, there is no longer any outside. There’s no “user” in the traditional sense. There’s only participation in a system that converts your language into labor, and your labor into capital, without asking first.

And because it’s not surveillance in the classic sense—there’s no spy camera, no facial recognition—the entire operation slides under the threshold of public alarm.

The State Can’t Respond Because It Wasn’t Built to Regulatory bodies are built for a world of visible actors and discrete harms. But Musk’s maneuver here isn’t a violation of law. It’s a reconfiguration of power.

The SEC can’t say the deal’s fraudulent—he owns both sides.

The FCC can’t say it’s a misuse of telecommunications—X isn’t quite that.

Antitrust can’t bite—there’s no market consolidation, just internal reshuffling.

What we’re left with is a legal framework built on 20th-century assumptions trying to grapple with 21st-century structures.

And the response, both official and popular, is a kind of quiet shrug.

When the Structure Is Illegible, So Is the Threat The hardest part of this moment isn’t that people don’t care. It’s that people don’t have a category for what this is. It’s not clear what’s changed, or how it affects them, so the whole thing gets flattened into a quirk of billionaire behavior.

But this isn’t just another eccentric move. This is a shift in who gets to shape language, meaning, and public imagination—at scale, in real time, with no meaningful constraint.

The platforms aren’t just sites of speech anymore. They are sites of simulation. They take in what we say, and spit back models of what we might say next. And the models, increasingly, are being used to make decisions—content decisions, political ones, economic ones, infrastructural ones.

That feedback loop is already running. The xAI acquisition just tightens it.

So What Do We Do? This isn’t a call to arms. I don’t think there’s a lever to pull. What I want is simpler and harder:

We need to start building new categories.

We need to understand that not all power looks like governance, and not all governance looks like laws. When we mistake structural shifts for personal drama, we miss the real story. And when we only recognize harm after it’s happened, we cede the future to those who can act faster than we can comprehend.

The move was simple: xAI acquired X. The consequences are not.

We need better vision. That’s where it starts.