AI start-up founded by Elon Musk (xAI) is willing to pay Telegram over $300 million to integrate its Grok Chatbot, which aims to reach over 1 Billion users of the social messaging app (Telegram) and to boost its position in the fast-growing artificial intelligence market.
On Wednesday, in a post on X Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that the $300 million will be paid in cash and stock, as well as xAI will also pay the Telegram app for any subscription made to the messaging app under the one-year deal.
According to Durov, rok integration will not harm user data.
This deal will put Telegram ahead of rivals like WhatsApp and many other platforms in the field of the AI sector to extract revenue through this method.
This year xAI has signed several partnerships to strengthen its position in Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and the financial sector.
On March 28, 2025, Elon Musk announced that xAI acquired sister company X Corp., the developer of the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform, which was previously acquired by Musk in October 2022. The deal, an all-stock transaction, valued X at $33 billion, with a full valuation of $45 billion when factoring in $12 billion in debt.
xAI itself was valued at $80 billion. Both companies were combined into a single entity called X.AI Holdings Corp.
Due to the depletion of many Open-source databases, artificial intelligence startups find it more and much difficult to obtain high-quality data, which is now forcing companies like meta Meta Platforms to use public interaction with AI to train their models.
As per the privacy policy, X to train its AI models uses public posts from different users. As of now, it is unclear whether they will keep the same integration with the social messaging app (Telegram) or not.
Telegram reported its first-ever profit of $540 million on revenue of $1.4 billion in 2024. With 15 million subscribers and 2.5 million new users every day it is expected to generate revenue of almost $2 billion with a profit of $700 million in 2025. Compared to previous years when the company endured a sharp deficit, these stats represent an enormous comeback.
This data eventually confirms Telegram’s long-term monetization plans for investors. According to the WSJ, Telegram announced the AI deal, an oversubscribed $1.5 billion bond offering at a 9% yield, with major backers including BlackRock, Citadel, and Mubadala. In a hidden bet that Telegram would go public before 2030, the five-year paper renewals debt from a 2021 changeable bond and incorporates an IPO-linked conversion inducement.
The bond’s performance shocked some of the market watchers, particularly in light of CEO Durov’s ongoing legal woes. Despite Telegram’s unit economics and growth potential, investors seem ready to price that risk as noise.
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What is xAI?
xAI was founded by Musk on March 9, 2023, and has since been headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Igor Babuschkin, formerly associated with the Google DeepMind unit, was recruited by Musk to be the Chief Engineer. Musk officially announced the formation of xAI on July 12, 2023 – Wikipedia.
