Is Elon Musk making a power play for more control at Tesla?
The richest man in the world threw a temper tantrum on his X/Twitter platform the other day saying he wants to increase his ownership stake in Tesla, which will come along with more voting rights, from his current 13% stake to 25% which is almost double what he currently has.
Why is he doing this? Well, it’s Elon Musk, so who can be sure.
What we do know is what he posted on his social media platform X, which we will continue to call Twitter because it’s a better name.
“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned. Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”
So there you have it, from the world’s richest man-child throwing a fit about not having enough money and power.
This all stems from Elon Musk’s desire to “grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics” according to an article on CNN, but he feels that without a compensation plan that rewards him for his genius then he’d rather take his ball and go elsewhere to develop his AI and robotics.
Ironically, Elon Musk already has another company called X.AI that literally makes Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology such as the Large Language Model (LLM) chat bot Grok that he debuted late last year. Why did he go off and make that company if he actually wanted to develop AI at Tesla?
My wild guess is he plans to grow X.AI to a certain size, develop a bunch of cutting edge software, gain market share, and then threaten to sell it to a competitor unless Tesla cuts him a big check. I mean, why get paid only once if you can rip off your own company multiple different times and ways, am I right Elon?
Once upon a time Elon Musk did own more than 20% in Tesla, but that was before he had the great idea of buying Twitter, laying off ¾’s of the company, and turning it into a cesspool of conspiracy nuts and allowing it to fill up with hate speech. Now he wants to up his ownership in Tesla for doing nothing except what is supposed to be his job as CEO. Talk about hypocrisy.
As a longtime Tesla stockholder I’ve benefited from Elon Musk’s genius, and I’m a big fan of everything Tesla does. I’m excited about how they are developing their own AI to speed up the evolution of self-driving cars by running driving simulations and analyzing the hours of real world driving that their vehicles are doing on a daily basis. I think a lot of the areas that Tesla is developing products show a lot of promise like Tesla moving into the Energy sector, solar power generation, and HVAC (which is a market I wish they’d further explore). Tesla developing their own AI to power innovation in these sectors makes a lot of sense, and I’m all for it.
Elon Musk is no stranger to large compensation packages from Tesla. He’s previously held the title for having the largest compensation package in corporate history. It’s been 6 years now since his latest compensation package that was announced in 2018 and is worth $56 billion.
For the world’s richest man who’s worth roughly $229 billion, how much is enough?
Apparently there’s no limit to how much money and power Elon Musk craves.
