Tesla Inc. is an electric car company, but arguably its most important mission is generating cash for Elon Musk. This is not just me saying that. In 2017, Musk told a Tesla director that he needed billions of dollars from Tesla “so that I can put as much as possible towards minimizing existential risk by putting the money towards Mars.” “Colonizing Mars is an expensive endeavor,” a Delaware Chancery Court judge wrote this year. “Musk believes he has a moral obligation to direct his wealth toward that goal, and Musk views his compensation from Tesla as a means of bankrolling that mission.” Maybe Mars was more of a 2017 thing, and in 2024 Musk has competing priorities (artificial intelligence, brain implants, Twitter), but the point is:
I do not want to suggest that Tesla is purely Elon Musk’s personal piggybank, because that’s not true. It makes electric cars. It continues to invest in new projects. It has, historically, generated a whole lot of value for Tesla shareholders other than Elon Musk, though not as much recently. (It has lost more than 60% of its value since the peak in 2021.) But Telsa is also Musk’s main piggybank, and he has a lot of needs. Musk went and solved the (difficult, capital-intensive) problem of electric cars, and now Tesla is his main source of wealth for solving the many other difficult, capital-intensive problems that interest him.
