No one knows what this means, which is, I think, the point of the transaction.
Musk paid $44 billion for the equity of Twitter. He did it by borrowing $12 billion and paying $32 billion of his, and his investors, money. So right before he bought it it had $44 billion of equity. Right after, $32 billion, but the same enterprise value, only more leverage. He just did a funding round about a month ago to raise $1 billion at, what was reported by him with no supporting detail, a $32 billion equity / $44 billion enterprise value. Now he is saying the sale of the company happened at $33 billion / $45 billion.
But what does it mean that he sold the company? There are outside investors. Did they get cashed out at the same price? Or did he simply sell his controlling interest at that price?
If it is just his controlling interest, he replaced it with xAI shares that he already owns. So, sure pick any number. It is just moving from the right pocket to the left pocket. But if he cashed out others then he is giving up something of value (xAI shares).
But at what value? He says the xAI share price chosen valued that company at $80 billion. The last independent funding round where they revealed a price valued xAI at $51 billion. The two funding rounds after that, they did not reveal a valuation, which always causes the market to assume it was a down round, but who knows.
Musk has also been in talks to raise $10 billion at a $75 million valuation. If that is a post cash number then it implies a $65 billion valuation without that investment.
So, saying xAI was worth $80 billion when doing this transaction implies that if outside investors were cashed out, the terms may not have been that favorable. If xAI is worth $65 (or $51) billion when they say it is worth $80 billion then the investors did not really get a $33/$45 billion dollar valuation on X. Working backward if the xAI shares were overvalued by 18.75% (65/80), then the real implied price for X is $26 billion, rather than $33.
But they still get some upside exposure to xAI. And maybe that is enough in their minds.
But the real point of the transaction is this gets the market to stop talking about the X valuation because it is now just a subsidiary of xAI.