One curious event did not manage to remain in the shadow of Tesla’s quarterly report: the head of the company, Elon Musk, yesterday brought up for public discussion the idea of directing $5 billion of the automaker’s funds to finance the startup xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence systems. Having secured the support of X subscribers, the billionaire is now ready to discuss this idea with the Tesla board of directors.
Image source: xAI, X
At least, as Reuters notes, on Elon Musk’s own page on the social network X, which also belongs to him, a message appeared on Thursday with the following content: “It seems that the public supports the idea. We will discuss this with the Tesla board of directors.” Let us recall that Musk initially explained the need to coordinate such initiatives not only with Tesla’s board of directors, but also with shareholders through voting at their meeting. Still, $5 billion is a lot of money for an automaker that recently saw profit margins fall to a five-year low.
Elon Musk, who owns six companies to one degree or another, is often reproached by shareholders for having a conflict of interest and irrational redistribution of resources between them. Founded in 2023, xAI has already attracted the attention of activists monitoring such actions. Firstly, Musk had to keep Tesla’s artificial intelligence specialists from moving on their own initiative to rival OpenAI, but at the same time there was a flow of personnel to xAI. Secondly, it is generally accepted that the Tesla executive redirects scarce Nvidia accelerators for the needs of both X and xAI. This potentially slows down Tesla’s own projects.
Back in 2016, a scandal erupted over the purchase of SolarCity by Tesla. The first was managed by close relatives of Elon Musk, and he had to prove in court that the transaction price was not artificially inflated. Musk managed to challenge this charge in court, but he still should have excluded his own participation in this deal, as the justice authorities considered.