Elon Musk threatened to abandon some of Tesla’s most important work on Monday in an ongoing battle over how much he gets paid. The billionaire tweeted that he’s “uncomfortable” working on AI and robotics projects at the company unless he gains more control of its stock. Musk, who owns about a 13% share in the company, threatened to “build products outside of Tesla” if his ownership doesn’t grow to 25%.
“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,” Musk tweeted Monday. “Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”
The growing importance of AI seems to be the latest bargaining chip in a recent legal fight between Musk and his own shareholders. In July, 2023, Musk and other Tesla board members returned $735 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of siphoning money from the organization. Tesla’s board members also agreed they wouldn’t be compensated for 2021, 2022, or 2023.
“I should note that the Tesla board is great,” Musk wrote. “The reason for no new ‘compensation plan’ is that we are still waiting for a decision in my Delaware compensation case. The trial for that was held in 2022, but a verdict has yet to be made.” Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s share of the company has been shrinking ever since he was forced to buy Twitter, after he announced his intention to buy the company then tried to back out. The $44 billion sticker price was a lot, even for the world’s richest man, and Musk sold billions in Tesla stock in part to finance the deal both before and after he took control of the platform. Still, Musk maintains one of the largest individual shares of the car maker.
AI already makes up a major part of Tesla’s business, and Musk predicts it will grow to become even more significant than the company’s cars. The most obvious example is Tesla’s misleadingly named level 2 driver-assistance system “full self driving mode” (which the company now admits isn’t actually fully self driving after legal threats). But robots could be a bigger part of the company’s future, if you believe the mercurial Musk.
Hours before threatening his own company, Musk tweeted a video of Tesla’s new humanoid robot Optimus awkwardly folding a shirt, something it apparently can’t even do without human assistance. The world got a memorable introduction to Optimus in 2021, when Musk infamously forced a guy to walk around in a spandex suit pretending to be a robot. But the billionaire proved the robot is real, if nothing else, the following year, with a debut that featured the robot drunkenly wandering around a stage chaperoned by a team of employees who seemed terrified it might fall over. Don’t let that scare you off: Musk promises that Optimus “ultimately will be worth more than the car business and worth more than full self-driving.”
Musk’s army of followers on X/Twitter seem generally enthusiastic about the billionaire’s warnings about the future of Tesla. The Neolibertarian Twitter movement that Musk champions online is increasingly concerned about the “wokeness” of artificial intelligence. The CEO and many of his followers are alarmed that chatbots, including one built by Musk himself, won’t parrot their extremist views on issues such as the human rights of trans people. On X, Musk spent Monday afternoon going back and forth with followers who worried that AI might destroy the world if he doesn’t have more control of Tesla.