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As someone who believes AI will revolutionize society, Elon Musk is certain that his xAI company will crossover into Tesla and his other companies in ways that will spark monumental successes. In fact, he intends to integrate a central intelligence layer across his entire portfolio of companies. Will it work? Is AI the best allocation of Musk’s talents for the next decade? What about the $10 billion compensation package he just received from Tesla? Is Tesla somewhere down the list of Musk’s interests these days? It’s a conundrum. Musk’s fascination with AI has some longtime followers curious; others are confused.
Is it actually possible for Musk — he’s just one human being after all — to maneuver his various and very intensive companies to profitability by harnessing AI in new and inventive ways?
Under his new pay plan, Musk will expand Tesla’s nascent robotaxi business and grow the company’s market value to at least $8.5 trillion from about $1.1 trillion today. The plan spans 10 years. Musk must remain at Tesla as either CEO or as an executive officer responsible for product or operations in order to receive his shares, which are divided into 12 tranches. To qualify, Musk has to hit 12 market capitalization milestones matched with 12 operational milestones.
That’s a tall order as he steps full force into xAI.
Steps Behind The Scenes: Musk’s Moves To Gain AI Dominance
In a break from his tendency to leverage digital platforms to bypass traditional gatekeepers, Musk, 54, spoke to staff this week about his outlook for xAI, his two-year-old start-up that is playing catch-up to its competitors in the race to build artificial intelligence.
In March, Musk merged his artificial intelligence company, xAI, and his social media company, X. The deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. This merger was an essential element of Musk’s long-term strategizing, as xAI’s chatbot, Grok, now has access to a massive and continuously updating training dataset of human interactions.
Unlike other means of inputting data into a chatbot so that it understands and responds appropriately to the users’ questions, Grok has access to the real human language of social media posts. It’s not an assembled body of curated work in a laboratory setting, as might otherwise be the case in AI training systems. Grok has real human conversations to draw upon, decipher, and interpret. It’s a big deal.
This isn’t Musk’s first foray into combining AI and another of his companies. Millions of Tesla vehicles have provided real-time, physical-world sensor data over the years. Grok is already powering the voice of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, which are being developed to handle work inside factories and other businesses. Tesla EVs will reportedly host Grok — even though it had posted antisemitic comments and praised Adolf Hitler until it was reprogrammed. It’s all been fixed, we’re assured.
Musk has made it a recent point to reinforce the short physical proximity between the Tesla and xAI offices. “The reason xAI is here is because Tesla is right across the road,” he mentioned during a meeting this week. “My prediction is: Optimus will be more productive than the entire global economy. That the output of goods and services from Optimus will far exceed the global economy, of everyone on Earth.”
Ethical questions continually hamper Musk’s companies.
Musk’s Mercurial Nature: A Benefit Or Detriment For Tesla & xAI?
A recent New York Times article chronicles how Musk has approached xAI with a great deal of spontaneity. Pushing hard to recruit and release researchers, Musk has spent billions of dollars on tech for xAI. Musk said that Grok has 64 million monthly users, which is significantly less than ChatGPT’s roughly 700 million weekly users for OpenAI.
As is his way, Musk forecast that xAI’s product would help quintuple advertising revenue to $10 billion a year at X, his social media platform.
Was it Orwellian when Musk described how he was in the process of “maximally truth-seeking” with xAI? Can Musk make us believe that his “truth-seeking” philosophy is little more than self-serving? His key themes always seem to include an emphasis on free speech, resistance to institutional control, and promotion of technological innovation as societal solutions. He suggests that, “if you force the AI to lie or believe things that are not true, you’re at great risk of creating a dystopian future.” In May, Musk told more than 100 employees in a group chat that Grok was too woke.
Whether he speaks through a social media post or in person, Musk has a tendency to amplify polarizing messages, redefine leader–follower dynamics, and facilitate global influence, as experts write in the International Journal of Public Leadership. Certainly, regulators have questioned him for years.
Is it really possible to separate Musk’s fascination with AI and his well-documented attentional issues? Tesla board chair, Robyn Delhom referred to Musk in a social media post as a “Once-In-A-Generation Visionary.” Yet the network of xAI – Tesla – X – SpaceX – relies on Musk and Musk alone. Should he crumble, so do the companies around him, including the least stable xAI.
Tesla Master Plans — Some Successes, Lots Of Unrealized Promises
Musk’s choices are often perilous: laden with financial risk as he intermingles his various ventures in a way that often seems less vertical integration and more spontaneous decisions without fully evaluation of consequence. After the many false starts and dead ends of Musk’s ambitions, can we believe that his fascination with AI will achieve long-term profitability and stability? Musk admittedly doesn’t adhere to business plans, as he feels they’re impossible to follow when future innovations reach into the unknown. Need we look further than the circuitous routes he’s taken with the Tesla Master Plans?
The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me): Initially, he recognized the impact of helping to expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy with a Master Plan. The first Tesla Master Plan was visionary yet successful — the all-electric car company was able to move from manufacturing a high profit, premium vehicle that allowed lesser expensive vehicles to follow, like the Model 3 and Model Y. A+.
Master Plan, Part Deux: Musk largely failed to realize many of the goals within Master Plan II. He teased his shareholders with notions of electrified public transit and goods movement, the Semi, a Tesla bus, and evolving autonomous features that would lead to a global, roving fleet of zero-emission robotaxis.
Master Plan Part 3: This third iteration was fundamentally about scaling — not just car production but the whole supply chain that feeds that electric car production as well. Our colleague, Mike Barnard, notes that it was not a roadmap for Tesla, as there were no Tesla-specific targets or timelines.
Master Plan Part 4: With the latest Master Plan, the Tesla CEO focuses on “building the products and services that bring AI into the physical world.” Elon Musk’s Master Plan IV was really different from his previous three plans. CleanTechnica Zachary Shahan suggests that Master Plan IV was designed to be “a narrative and a plan for massive, unprecedented growth.”
Musk fosters direct engagement with followers and would really like to see his loyal Tesla shareholders join the xAI company. Shareholders are scheduled to vote on the proposal in early November.
Screenshot grabbed from X
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