FILE – A Tesla logo is seen at the company’s store in Denver’s Cherry Creek Mall on Feb. 9, 2019. Owning Tesla stock in 2022 has been anything but a smooth ride for investors. Shares in the electric vehicle maker are down nearly 70% since the start of the year, on pace to finish in the bottom five biggest decliners among S&P 500 stocks. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
(Bloomberg/Kurt Wagner) — Tesla Inc. shareholders will vote in November to decide if the electric carmaker should invest in Elon Musk’s closely held artificial intelligence startup, xAI.
The planned vote, which was part of a shareholder proposal disclosed Friday in Tesla’s annual proxy statement, could further entwine Musk’s business empire. XAI, which Musk started in early 2023, already merged with his social networking company X in March. SpaceX, Musk’s private rocket business, also invested $2 billion into xAI earlier this year.
The board made no recommendation on whether shareholders should vote for or against the proposal.
Musk has previously voiced support for a potential Tesla investment in xAI, posting in July that, “If it was up to me, Tesla would have invested in xAI long ago.” But he has also said that he believes the final decision should come from Tesla shareholders.
XAI has raised billions of dollars in funding already this year, and is spending aggressively on data centers and specialized computer chips in an effort to catch up to rivals like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. As of July, xAI was burning through $1 billion a month, Bloomberg News reported. Musk called the report “nonsense.” The company operates a chatbot called Grok that has been folded into the X social network and also Tesla’s vehicles.
Tesla’s shareholder vote is schedule for Nov. 6.
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Originally published at Bloomberg