Elon Musk Gives Himself Another Handshake – Pixel Envy

Berber Jin and Becky Peterson, Wall Street Journal:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has agreed to invest $2 billion in his artificial-intelligence company xAI, investors close to the companies said, nearly half of the Grok chatbot maker’s recent equity raise.

This comes just a few months after xAI acquired X, one year after Musk shifted a bunch of Tesla-bound Nvidia GPUs to xAI, and just a few years after he used staff from Tesla to work on Twitter. So, to recap: he has moved people and resources from a publicly traded company to a privately owned one — twice — has used funds from one of his privately owned companies to buy another one of his privately owned companies, and is now using one of his publicly traded privately owned companies to give billions of dollars to (another) one of his privately owned ones.

(Update: SpaceX is privately owned, not publicly traded. Thank you, Matt.)

This feels wrong. This feels like a crime. I am not saying a crime was committed, nor do I know what laws may possibly have been broken here. But it certainly has a flavour of something that must — or, at least, should be — illegal. At the very least, it cannot be helping convince E.U. regulators that Musk’s businesses are, indeed, separate entities.