It is sometimes useful to think of all of Elon Musk’s ventures as one big company. I like to call it the Musk Mars Conglomerate, because it seems to

Musk Keeps Paying for X

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2024-10-17 19:00:05

It is sometimes useful to think of all of Elon Musk’s ventures as one big company. I like to call it the Musk Mars Conglomerate, because it seems to be loosely organized around a theme of getting humans to Mars. (SpaceX rockets will take them there, Boring Company will dig tunnels for their habitats, Tesla will build appropriately cyberpunk vehicles to travel around Mars and Twitter/X will, I am not even kidding, be the government.1 ) Musk’s ventures seem to pretty freely share employees, resources, money and investors; sometimes, when it is convenient, they even merge with one another. There is a rough sense in which they are all one big company, where Musk is the founder, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder, and he gets to allocate resources among them in whatever way he thinks will maximize the overall value.

But only in a rough sense. In fact they are separate companies with separate legal structures and separate (though overlapping) shareholders. And in fact people pretty regularly get annoyed when Musk seems to allocate resources from Tesla (a public company) to his other businesses.