With Tesla dealing with declining demand, and the cultural transition to a larger and more stable company, I understand why Elon would peel off AI, finance it with commercially reasonable contracts from Tesla, twitter, and spacex, and boom - you’ve got like the second highest revenue ai company in the world with arguably some of the most valuable proprietary data in the world, especially for the robotics / physical world stuff that’s coming, and it could be operating in that sweet spot he seems to like of massive growth operational + research scale out startup.
I wonder if xai needs custom hardware to win. I don’t think so. But I’m also unsure what winning looks like: AGI? Home assistant robot? Should be a fun five years to see what they end up doing.
Business judgment is something we rely on from boards and executives all the time. Lack of disclosure and unfair transfer pricing are huge no-nos, but the existence of deals that are fair and beneficial to a public company is in no way prevented in the US.
EDIT: and, to be clear, while being publicly listed increases disclosure requirements, it doesn’t radically change your duties to shareholders as an exec/board member vs a private company. Once you have non-accredited investors on your cap table you owe them quite a lot in duty of care, regardless of listing venue for your stock. And of course you owe accredited investors a duty of care as well. Ultimately in the US we solve questions of fairness through adversarial legal proceedings, eg tbe SolarCity acquisition (deemed okay by the courts).
You cannot exchange any value between two just because you are majority owner of both. Otherwise elon with 51% could start Zesla (own 100% of it) and transfer all assets from Tesla to Zesla.
Although this is a clear case of self-dealing by Musk.
What can he get for acting to the detriment of the company in the US?