Should You Cheer Or Boo If There Ever Comes A Time Where OpenAI Acquires X?

So, there's a tech version of the Kendrick-Drake beef taking place in 2025. Sure, there are always squabbles in tech and business worlds, but this one seems to be a bit more interesting, especially if it might?determine the future of AI.

Have you seen that 2017 Y Combinator video of Elon Musk outlining some video game recommendations? If you pay closer attention, you might notice that the interviewer is OpenAI CEO Samuel Altman and they amicably banter about what are good video games to play.?Cut to 2025 and there seems to be a bit of a rivalry?between the?two.

AI behemoth OpenAI was said to be co-founded as a non-profit focused on making sure AI benefits humanity. Elon was said to be a co-founder and an early backer, until he left in 2018, citing disagreements over the direction and governance of OpenAI. Over time and since then, OpenAI is said to have transitioned into a capped-profit model, which is said to limit returns for investors to 100x their original investment. That capped-profit model seems to be something that has not sat right with Elon.

And in February 2025, it was reported that Elon Musk had informally approached the AI goliath with an offer to buy it for $97 billion. That's a lot of cheddar. Samuel wasted no time in turning Elon down with a firm and unequivocal "No, thanks". And the cherry on the top was the somewhat sardonic retort by Samuel that OpenAI would be willing to buy Twitter for close to $10 billion, if Elon were interested. While there may not have been a formal offer, the OpenAI CEO was said to have remarked that even if such an offer were to be made, the Board would reject it outright.

That line was most likely super sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek. But, for a moment, what would happen if that were real? What if it actually happened? An AI company controlling a major social media platform? Whoa!

Unfortunately, there's a sense that algorithms and trending topics still dominate what you read when you scroll on X. That might be a bit stale. Or maybe, there's a sense that discourse on X is a mess of hot takes, misinformation and ideological echo chambers. Imagine AI obliterating low-value discussions.

What if X had an AI assistant that could keep your interests and preferences in mind and curates and collates relevant accounts and tidbits of information for you??Instead of rewarding controversy with engagement, this might reward depth and insight.

And if a response to a post isn't as insightful and meaningful, AI ranks and filters it much lower than other responses. Or imagine, if you've read 100 bad takes on a topic. What if OpenAI's GPT give you a collation of the smartest arguments on both sides?

Is the world ready for value, insight and relevance, as opposed to cheap dopamine hits? That's a radical transformation in how people consume content.

Imagine a social media platform that genuinely makes people smarter and more informed. This could actually make every other social media platform a little less relevant and a lot more obsolete.

Maybe, traditional moderation on X isn't as cool as people would like it to be. Have there been false bans or inconsistent enforcement of rules? Could OpenAI have AI-powered moderation that understands tone, nuance and sarcasm? Maybe, you could chat with an LLM defending your post or account that gets taken down. But, at the same time, OpenAI's GPT could flag hate speech and misinformation with a bit more focus and contextual understanding.?No more bot armies, co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour goes out the window.?Could that work better than keyword filtering??

Plus, Elon has that "pay-to-play" verification model, which might have made the problem worse, so could OpenAI step in to curate meaningful change? Could a GPT understand the behaviour patterns of an account to raise its eyebrow if there's suddenly frequent posting of propaganda or misinformation? Cue the flagged account. It's an interesting way to clean up X overnight. Using AI to make engagement more authentic: that sounds fun.

And maybe, that AI assistant could summarize global events for you, instead of contributing to information overload, kind of like InShorts for X. Could this help with AI moderation, too??X, already, has Grok, could it do that without?requiring OpenAI to acquire X??

OpenAI might get something out of this, too.?X, formerly known as Twitter, consistently has quick and real-time knowledge dissemination through news, views and images. OpenAI is said to rely on publicly available datasets and web searches. If you consider X a treasure trove of constantly-updating human conversations of every fathomable topic, that could help improve AI's reasoning and sentiment analysis. OpenAI's very own HUGE sandbox to help it train and deploy AI on a massive and very public scale.?A real-time human dataset for AI training

Of course, X has faced some content moderation challenges, so would OpenAI use AI to deal with that to complement Community Notes? Would it be cool handling those advertiser relationships? Maybe, there'd be a separate exec team to handle X's operations, while its AI division may focus on scaling OpenAI. The AI company does seem to have the firepower and tech know-how to solve these problems with some AI tools. Not a patch-up, a permanent fixture.

It's said that OpenAI may be valued at close to $160 billion in its last funding round. Most likely Elon wouldn't sell. His attachment to X may be financial, to some extent, but it might be a bit more personal than that. He seems attached to X for more than 20 years and it's part of his kid's name, who just met Donald in the Oval Office.

Of course, to some extent, all of this is looking through rose-coloured glasses. In theory, a lot of this sounds wonderful, but the reality with social media ownership is that a person or entity gets to control narratives, determine what's the truth and how much human agency there ought to be in the process of it all. If an AI-driven company owns one of the world's largest public discourse platforms, it might be an invitation to a whole new level of control and centralization.?

And sure, social media might thrive on the super-chaotic and unpredictable nature of human conflict with a lot of noise, emotion and outrage, but that might lead to some beautiful cultural moments. With all that's happening in the world, maybe, social media can be seen as the rawness of human thought shattering sanitized narratives. And that's a lot more beautiful than you think. But, if OpenAI optimizes all of that, it might create a huge dent in all of that via sterility.?

Sudden utterances may have a lot of weirdness, but there's an air of serendipity to the whole thing, too. Whatever you consume may feel engineered and pre-filtered and it's the AI doing the pre-thinking for users, at a time when a lot of folks, especially young people, are relinquishing their creativity and thinking to LLMs.

It's a classic case of unintended consequences. By wanting to sterilize human discourse online, X ends up becoming an AI-powered soulless and lifeless intellectual prison. It's like Jerome Seinfeld being all stoic and grave in front of George Costanza's date instead of being his usual funny: there's something off about that.

With OpenAI potentially owning X, it wouldn't just control an LLM, it would control the filter through which a lot of people receive information. And these are AI systems that are said to have been already criticized for bias and hallucinations, like most AI models, so something like that at scale governing a platform where the most influential conversations take place - oof!

Plus, in a way, this could be AI-powered mass surveillance. Every post you form, every reply you write, every DM you send: all of that could be ingested, stored and analyzed to train an AI model. You might not be the biggest fan of that.

If it ever came to that, would you want to be part of an AI-dominated social media platform?