Elon Musk wants to have more control of Tesla as the company pushes into advanced technology beyond manufacturing cars.
In a post on his platform Twitter/X, he wrote: “I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having 25 per cent 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. You don’t seem to understand that Tesla is not one startup, but a dozen.”
He added: “At 15 per cent or lower, the for/against ratio to override me makes a takeover by dubious interests too easy,” implying that the value he created in the business could be taken by major asset managers who own big stakes in the business.
The billionaire’s holding in the electric car business dropped from 22 per cent to 13 per cent after he sold shares in order to pay for his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform now re-branded as X.
While the company manufactures electric vehicles, it is also working on other areas, such as developing a supercomputer called Tesla Dojo, building the artificial intelligence (AI) needed to power driverless cars.
It analyses information from vast databases gathered by cameras and sensors on millions of vehicles. Tesla predicts that Dojo, which went into production in July last year, will become one of the world’s most powerful computer systems in 2024. It will spend more than $1 billion on it this year.
The company is building a humanoid robot called Optimus, with a view to doing things that humans do not want to, or as Tesla puts it, “capable of performing unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks”. A recent video Musk posted shows the robot folding a T-shirt.
Dan Ives, at Wedbush, said: “The board and top shareholders are well aware of the ‘key man risk’ with Musk, especially around AI with the AI revolution on the doorstep for the tech industry and Tesla.”
He added: “ At the end of the day we believe the board and Musk will be able to resolve this issue over the next three to six months and ultimately all AI initiatives will be kept within Tesla.”
Musk’s Tesla pay packet has not been updated since 2018, when the company was sued over the compensation deal which could have made Musk a maximum of $56 billion were he to hit company growth targets. A verdict has not been reached.