The company behind Grok is spending billions in an attempt to challenge OpenAI and its ChatGPT for leadership in the race to develop artificial general intelligence. Last week Musk unveiled the fourth generation of his Grok chatbot, which is currently rolling out to Tesla vehicles, just a day after setting a date for the carmaker’s long-delayed annual meeting.
“If it was up to me, Tesla would have invested in xAI long ago,” Musk posted Sunday evening. “We will have a shareholder vote on the matter.”
Moreover, as Musk indicated, he has been eyeing a Tesla investment in xAI for some time. Roughly four weeks after Tesla’s previous annual general meeting in June 2024, Musk ran a social media poll to this effect.
In it, he asked X users — only a small portion of whom were likely Tesla investors — whether the car company should invest $5 billion “assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors”. When two thirds of the nearly one million responses were in favor, Musk promised to discuss the issue with the board.
Since then, however, there has been few new developments.
That could be because using money that belongs to Tesla shareholders for the purchase of a stake in Musk’s xAI is not so simple from a governance perspective. Even with a clear use case like the integration of Grok into Tesla EVs, there is a conflict of interest.
Nonetheless, AI is a very different shareholder value proposition than solar roofing, and a number of investors have argued in favor of buying an equity stake.
