Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he can be uncomfortable growing the automaker to be a pacesetter in artificial intelligence and robotics without having at the very least 25% voting control of the corporate, nearly double his current stake.
Musk said on Monday in a post on social media platform X, formerly often known as Twitter, that unless he got stock on this planet’s most precious automaker that was “enough to be influential, but not a lot that I can’t be overturned,” at Tesla, he would like to construct products outside of the electric-vehicle manufacturer.
He has long touted Tesla’s partially automated “Full Self-Driving” software and its prototype humanoid robots however the electric-vehicle maker generates most of its revenue from its automotive business.
Some analysts have also pegged the technologies, including Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer to coach AI models, as drivers of the EV maker’s valuation, with Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas saying in September that Dojo could boost its market value by almost $600 billion.
Tesla’s shares were flat on Tuesday, following Musk’s comments.
Musk, the world’s richest person, currently owns around 13% of Tesla stock after selling billions of dollars of shares in 2022 partly to assist finance his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.
In a separate post on X, he said he can be superb with a dual-class share structure to attain his goal of getting 25% voting control, but was told it was unattainable after Tesla’s initial public offering.
“It’s weird that a crazy multi-class share structure like Meta has, which provides the following 20+ generations of Zuckerbergs control, is superb pre-IPO, but even an affordable dual-class isn’t allowed post-IPO,” he said, referring to the Facebook parent’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Corporations with dual-class structures have two or more varieties of shares with different voting rights — normally one with greater voting rights for founders or early investors and one other for other shareholders with less voting power.
Tesla didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Musk currently faces a lawsuit over his compensation package.
Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta sued Musk and the board in 2018 and hopes to prove the co-founder used his dominance over Tesla’s board to acquire an outsized compensation package that didn’t require him to work on the EV maker full-time.
Musk said on X there was no “feud” with the board over his latest compensation package and said the pending verdict was holding back the discussions.
