X gets bought... by xAI

Plus: Innovation at Nintendo; Early signals of big trends

Joey Padgett
March 31, 2025

Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

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Here’s today’s plan:

What’s up: In April, Nintendo will be launching Virtual Game Cards. With the cards, customers can transfer their digitally downloaded games between devices or even loan them to friends. Historically, swapping physical game cartridges was easy, but digital purchases were harder to transfer.
So what: This is smart for a few reasons. First, sharing is a win-win. Customers get to introduce games to their friends, and Nintendo gets more engagement on those games. Second, this will help Nintendo’s upcoming Switch 2 launch go even better, since customers can easily get games from their old Switch onto the new devices. And all that is compounded by the unsurprising fact more and more games are sold digitally — not with physical cartridges. Check out this graph from Tweaktown

What’s up: Elon’s AI company xAI has acquired X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock deal valuing the social media platform at $33 billion and xAI at $80 billion. Elon was quoted as saying that “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined… Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.”
So what: This is completely unsurprising. Elon was…

The forest is growing.
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