This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 3, 2026. We tell you what you need to know,

give you the important context, and help each other understand. And today, we'll explain why Twitter is now part of a rocket company.

What? I'm Jason Howell.

It actually makes sense.

I'm Tom Merritt.

It does, but that's a weird way to put it, but it does make sense.

Let's start with what you need to know with a big story.

Yeah, this is an interesting one.

I'm curious to get your take on it, Tom.

SpaceX is acquiring XAI in an all-stock deal.

It values the combined company at $1.25 trillion.

This is all ahead of an expected SpaceX IPO.

That's expected for later this year.

SpaceX is bringing rockets, you know, the Starlink Internet service, all that

stuff, while XAI is bringing its rock, its Aurora models, and yes, the X social platform,

now you understand the intro, to create a single stack that's going to cover, you know,

launch, connectivity, data, consumer AI services,

all under the same umbrella.

Eric Berger at Ars Technica is arguing that the big bet here is space-based data centers.

Musk, Elon Musk wants to put AI compute into orbit.

He wants to do it at high volume with Starship and Starlink,

kind of is the core enablers behind that. And thank you, Tom, for linking me to the Arstechnica article.

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