In a consolidation of his tech businesses, X owner Elon Musk said in a post on Friday that xAI, the developers of Grok, had acquired X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock transaction. According to Musk, the merger values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in April 2022. By October 2024, Fidelity Investments adjusted the valuation of its stake in X, estimating the company’s overall value to be approximately $9.4 billion.

Though its valuation had recovered somewhat by December 2024, it was still down a whopping 77% from Musk’s purchase price. How Musk arrived at a $33 billion valuation, in other words, would make for interesting reading.

Already the head of several companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, Musk launched xAI in July 2023, a year after purchasing Twitter. While he said the goal of xAI was to “understand reality,” an ongoing feud with former business partner OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was also a driving factor.

“Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach,” Musk wrote on X Friday. “The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.”

Calling X “the digital town square,” Musk said the platform boasted over 600 million active users. However, Meta, which launched a rival social media platform, Threads, in July 2023, and Bluesky, which launched in February of that year, have been trying to woo away users.

Bluesky’s user count surpassed 27.44 million users in January 2025, many of whom had left Twitter after Musk’s takeover. At the same time, bolstered by its connections to Facebook and Instagram, Threads had over 320 million monthly active users as of February 2025.

Musk made headlines in July of last year when it was revealed that Grok would be trained on X user data. The setting can be disabled, but is on by default for user accounts.

Some social media users jeered today’s announcement, mocking the apparently sizable valuation boost in a deal between two of Musk’s own companies.

“I also sold my 2008 Honda Accord to myself for $1 million,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac said on Bluesky.

“Wait a min…what’s different though… other than on paper?” an X user asked.

The merger, however, could serve a more pragmatic purpose. With X still carrying significant debt—$12 billion, according to Musk’s tweet—folding it into the xAI umbrella could give the company access to new investors, improved valuation, and a narrative pivot away from Twitter’s chaotic takeover.

“This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress,” he said.

Ever since the pyramids of Egypt rose from the desert over 4,000 years ago, people have wondered how they were built—sparking centuries of speculation, fringe theories, and wild claims involving lost technologies and extraterrestrials.

That speculation got a modern boost last fall when a Chinese research team claimed to have used radar to detect plasma bubbles above the Great Pyramid of Giza. These reports reignited online theories and alternative histories.

Building on that momentum, a group known as the Khafre Project, led by Professor Corrado Malanga from Italy’s University of Pisa and Researcher Filippo Biondi from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, attracted attention last week with its own dramatic claims of a vast network of underground structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre, reaching depths of up to 2,000 feet.

Accompanied by detailed graphics and viral videos, the group’s assertions quickly spread across social media, breathing new life into old mysteries.

X lit up with speculation, including theories that the chambers amplified Earth’s low-frequency electromagnetic waves—possibly functioning as an ancient power plant. Some even suggested the find could rewrite our understanding of the pyramids.

“The images suggest a hidden world under the feet of the Great Pyramids: halls and shafts that have waited millennia to be found,” technologist Brian Roemmele wrote in a blog post. “Such a scenario has an almost storybook allure as if turning the page on a chapter that historians didn’t know existed.”

Debunking the myth

However, Egyptologist and historian Flora Anthony wasn’t buying into the hype.

“Something seemed off, so I looked up the original source, read through it, and realized the paper had nothing to do with the images or claims being shared in the media,” she told Decrypt. “Turns out, the article isn’t peer-reviewed. Someone familiar with the journal where the report was published said they publish quickly and aren’t established in the field—which matters since peer review is important.”

The pyramids on the Giza Plateau—built during Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty between 2600 B.C. and 2500 B.C.—were royal tombs for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure.

The idea that extraterrestrials may have played a role in constructing the pyramids has long been a staple of fringe science and pop culture.

Proponents of this “Ancient Alien” theory point to the monuments’ precise alignment, massive scale, and engineering complexity as evidence that ancient civilizations couldn’t have built them alone.

“The people behind this aren’t scientists. One is a UFO researcher who believes aliens are interdimensional parasites that hijack human souls,” Anthony said. “The other writes conspiracy books about a lost, pre-dynastic Egyptian civilization and recently promoted a so-called ‘harmonic investigation’ of the Great Pyramid using a technology he claims to have patented.”

While their claims might sound impressive at first glance, there’s nothing solid underneath, Anthony added.

“None of it is peer-reviewed, credible, or based in real science,” she said. “It’s not science. It’s not history.”

Pseudoscience

Ancient Aliens theory, Anthony said, is rooted in pseudo-archaeology, eugenics, and historical racism, promoting the idea that African and Mesoamerican civilizations couldn’t have built monumental structures like the pyramids without help from extraterrestrials.

“These theories uphold white supremacy by pushing a false narrative of white superiority,” Anthony said. “No one questions how medieval European peasants—living in filth without basic sanitation—built intricate cathedrals. But when Africans or Mesoamericans build pyramids, suddenly it must be aliens.”

On March 16, The Khafre Project presented apparent evidence of five chambers and eight shafts, using annotated tomographic images and artist renderings to illustrate their findings.

Yet while social media continues to buzz with wild theories, Egyptologists, including Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, are unconvinced.

“It all sounds very improbable to me as most machinery cannot penetrate that deeply, and there is no data to evaluate this claim,” Ikram told Decrypt. “So far, it seems it is in the news, with no peer-reviewed paper or raw data to back this up. And the technology does not seem capable of what they claim.”

Ikram added that Egyptian authorities confirmed they had not granted the Khafre Project permission to conduct any work at the site.

Likewise, the fact-checking website Snopes investigated the Khafre Project’s claims and declared them false in a recent report.

“Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it,” the report said. “In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.”

Digging to the truth

The idea of using radar technology to scan the pyramids is not new.

Radar technology has been used multiple times to scan the pyramids of Giza, most notably in 2016 as part of the ScanPyramids project, revealing hidden voids and structural anomalies within the ancient monuments.

In 2022, researchers Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi conducted a synthetic aperture radar scan on the Khufu Pyramid, which many suspect is the basis for the Khafre Project’s images.

According to Snopes, the Khafre Project’s research has not been peer-reviewed or corroborated by credible archaeologists, pointing to what the organization called “Malanga’s well-documented interest in UFO and alien abduction research as well as Dunn’s “power plant” theory.”

“Additionally, one of the most popular images being shared in support of the claim, depicting a cross-section of the pyramid and the alleged structures, was generated using artificial intelligence,” Snopes said. “Uploading the image to the AI-detection platform Hive Moderation resulted in a 99.9% chance the image was generated using AI.”

Ultimately, the story says more about our appetite for mystery than it does about any discovery beneath the pyramids.

Until actual evidence surfaces, the only thing buried beneath the Giza Plateau is the truth—and for now, it’s staying that way.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair

When Swedish UFO film “Watch the Skies” hits U.S. cinemas this May, audiences won’t be able to tell that it wasn’t made in English.

The film is the first full theatrical release to showcase “visual dubbing” technology from AI firm Flawless, which enables actors’ performances to be digitally lip-synced with foreign-language dubs.

“Watch the Skies” follows rebellious teenager Denise, who teams up with a club of UFO watchers to solve the mystery of her missing father. The film was shot in Swedish, and released there under the title “UFO Sweden.” However, for its U.S. release, the original cast have re-recorded their performances in English, with Flawless using its TrueSync machine learning technology to digitally alter their lip movements so that they sync up with the English dialogue.

“Flawless and their technology gives us the opportunity to release the film for a much larger audience,” said writer-director Victor Danell in a making-of featurette.

The filmmakers stress that the use of the technique has “full endorsement from SAG,” the actors’ union, which went on strike in 2023 amid concerns over the “threat” posed by AI to the profession.

“A lot of filmmakers and a lot of actors will be afraid of this technology at first, but we have the creative control, and to act out the film in English was a real exciting experience,” said Danell, adding that, “It’s still our movie, it’s still the actors’ performance, and that’s the key part.”

What is TrueSync?

In a 2023 presentation, Flawless co-founder Scott Mann explained that the company’s TrueSync technology uses deep learning to create a volumetric 3D representation of the actors’ faces throughout a film, which can then be altered to match the dubbed dialogue.

TrueSync was previously used on the 2022 film “Fall” to remove swearing for a PG-13 edit, while another of the company’s products, DeepEditor, enables an actor’s performance to be extracted from one scene and applied to another scene, without the need for reshoots.

The company has partnered with distributor XYZ Films to release a slate of features localized using TrueSync, including “Run Lola Run” director Tom Tykwer’s upcoming “The Light,” horror feature “Vincent Must Die,” and South Korean film “Smugglers.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward