Elon Musk said he will seek board approval to invest $5bn in his artificial intelligence start-up xAI, potentially further entwinning his network of tech companies.
Musk on Tuesday posted a poll on his social media network X asking “should Tesla invest $5B into @xAI, assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors? (Board approval & shareholder vote are needed, so this is just to test the waters)”.
On Thursday, with 68 per cent of 958,086 votes in favor of the proposal, he replied: “Looks like the public is in favor. Will discuss with Tesla board.”
The independence of Tesla’s board has also been questioned. Earlier this year a Delaware court voided a record $56bn pay package it had awarded to Musk, calling directors “supine servants of an overweening master” and criticizing chair Robyn Denholm as having a “lackadaisical approach to her oversight obligations”.
However, Musk won a shareholder vote re-ratifying his historic stock award last month and is challenging the court’s decision.
Officially founded in July last year, xAI, which is building a chatbot called Grok, raised $6bn at a valuation of $18bn in May.
Musk is aiming to catch up with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, which have set the early pace in the race to develop intelligence chatbots. The Tesla boss admitted in an interview this week that his top AI model is an “order of magnitude” weaker than OpenAI’s.
The carmaker — which missed its second-quarter earnings estimates and plunged more than 10 per cent on Tuesday — is seeking to recast itself from an electric vehicle maker to a robotics and AI company.
Musk has committed to building a fleet of autonomous “robotaxis” and humanoid robots driven by the technology.
He said on the earnings call this week that “Tesla is learning quite a bit from xAI” with regards to training its full self-driving technology and building a new Tesla data center in Austin, Texas.
However, the investment, if consummated, could revive questions about conflicts of interest between Musk’s web of companies, which also includes SpaceX, the spacecraft operator, and Neuralink, which develops computer-brain interfaces.
The CEO has admitted to diverting thousands of scarce Nvidia chips from Tesla to X and xAI earlier this year, and many senior staff and engineers have moved between the businesses. Musk has denied there was any impropriety and said the chips were reallocated because the carmaker had not yet built the infrastructure to house the graphics processing units.
