Elon Musk has for years blurred the lines between the companies he leads.
The intermingling of Elon Inc. businesses — a number which shrank from six entities to five when xAI acquired X last year, and from five to four when SpaceX acquired xAI on Monday — is something of signature for the CEO.
Over the past three years, his companies have stepped up their internal dealings, investing billions in one another, agreeing to buy up each other’s products, and exchanging software and materials.
The result is a tightly knit corporate ecosystem centered on Musk, where work — and even employees — can flow between the various entities in the name of vertical integration.
Here are some of the recent sharing agreements, purchases, and investments between Musk’s companies.
Musk’s employees often work between companies
Photo by -/Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP via Getty Images
Musk has repeatedly drawn on employees from one company to support others in his portfolio.
In 2022, about a month after Musk bought Twitter — now known as X — he sent roughly 50 Tesla employees to the social-media company’s headquarters to help overhaul its code-review systems, according to court filings.
Musk later argued in court that the Tesla employees had “volunteered” to do the work and that their temporary reassignment should not concern Tesla’s board.
Executives share overlapping functions on several of Musk’s companies, too, according to insider org charts obtained by Business Insider.
For example, Charlie Kuehmann, the vice president of materials and engineering at Tesla, also holds the same title at SpaceX.
SpaceX contributes to Roadster, Tesla provides SpaceX with energy-storage systems
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
SpaceX is a major customer of Tesla’s energy business, purchasing batteries for robotics power and Megapack energy-storage systems.
It also reportedly invested $2 billion into xAI as a part of a previous funding round.
Musk has also said that Tesla’s long-awaited next-generation Roadster will be a “Tesla/SpaceX collab” and feature SpaceX-built cold-gas thrusters. The hyper-powered sports car’s launch event is penciled in for April 1.
“It’s gonna be really cool, and it’s gonna have some rocket technology in it,” Musk also said during a 2024 sit-down with Don Lemon.
SpaceX and Boring Company buy Tesla cars
Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS
Aside from full-blown investments or acquisitions, the most publicly visible example of Musk’s companies coordinating might be Tesla’s vehicle sales to his tunnel-building start-up.
The Boring Company, which operates tunnels in Las Vegas and Texas, uses fleets of Tesla vehicles to transport passengers through its underground systems. The tunnel builder has also constructed tunnels around Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas.
It isn’t alone. SpaceX also purchased an unspecified number of Musk’s Cybertrucks.
Tesla and xAI’s ‘framework agreement’ follows Grok integration into cars, Optimus demo bots.
Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images
Tesla’s earnings on Wednesday disclosed that it had agree to invest $2 billion in xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, with a related “framework agreement” to explore additional collaboration opportunities.
Tesla has already integrated xAI’s Grok into its vehicles, allowing drivers to chat with the AI and use it to add and edit navigation destinations.
Videos have shown early versions of Tesla’s in-development Optimus robot using xAI’s Grok AI chatbot for its voice.
xAI has also reportedly told investors that it’s working on AI that could power Tesla’s forthcoming Optimus humanoid robots.
Tesla executives said the $2 billion investment supports the automaker’s push into self-driving technology. For example, the earnings deck explained that xAI-developed software will analyze vehicle interiors and assist with route planning, including adding high-occupancy-vehicle lanes when the car is full.
For xAI, the investment adds capital to the cash-hungry buildout of data centers and their energy needs.
The deal marked one of the clearest examples of capital flowing from Musk’s public company into a privately held firm he controls.
It’s all par for the course for ‘Elon Inc.’
The growing web of internal deals has fueled discussion among investors and analysts about whether Musk’s companies are evolving into something closer to a single, vertically integrated enterprise.
And it’s not clear if it’ll stop at SpaceX combining with xAI.
There’s also been recent reports that Tesla could combine with SpaceX.
“In Tesla’s case, an important factor to consider is that investors are buying into Elon Musk’s vision for the future as much as they are buying into an automaker or clean energy company,” Lou Whiteman, a contributing analyst at The Motley Fool, told Business Insider.
“Since this group of companies, public and private, combine to represent Elon Musk’s full vision of the future, I’d bet that many investors are happy to see Tesla involved in all aspects of ‘Elon Inc.'”
