Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm commented on Friday on the upcoming shareholder vote regarding the EV maker’s potential investment in xAI, a company also founded and led by Elon Musk.
Earlier this month, the Board officially filed the shareholder-initiated proposal for the company to invest in xAI, which will be voted on at the 2025 Annual Shareholder Meeting on November 6.
“Now, therefore, be it resolved, that the shareholders of Tesla, Inc. request that the Board of Directors authorize an investment in xAI,” the statement said.
The proposal’s supporting statement said that it “did not prescribe the size or structure of the investment, allowing the Board flexibility to act in the best interests of Tesla and its shareholders.”
When questioned by Bloomberg why the Board hadn’t recommended the shareholder proposal — and whether rejection meant Tesla wouldn’t pursue the investment — Denholm said that the Board values the shareholders’ input.
“So, clearly, there are 16 proposals overall in the proxy,” she reminded, adding that “the xAI proposal is a shareholder proposal that has been put into the board.”
To the Board’s Chair, “the reason why we have not put a recommendation is that we want to hear from shareholders, in terms of what their views are, as to whether or not we should make an investment in xAI.”
She added, however, that “there’s a lot of misunderstanding of AI in the marketplace.”
“It is not one thing, it is a range of technologies. What Tesla is doing today with AI is quite different to what xAI does,” Denholm noted.
While xAI is working on fundamental areas in AI, it is also working on large language models (LLM), which she explained is “not what Tesla is doing.”
“As you can see behind me, with Optimus, we’re taking real world application of AI and putting it into physical products to actually empower those products to do things,” the Board member said.
Denholm mentioned that “with Optimus, it’s very visual,” adding that it is the same with Tesla‘s vehicles and the Full Self Driving (FSD) software that the company has been developing.
Earlier this week, Musk commented that the Optimus robot project was “the hardest ever in the company’s history.”
According to an X post by the CEO, the humanoid’s still on Version 2.5. “We haven’t shown Optimus V3 yet. It is sublime,” he wrote.
Musk has founded his artificial intelligence company xAI in early 2023.
In 2024, Elon Musk stated that he wanted about 25% voting control on Tesla to feel secure about developing AI and robotics within the company.
However, as that did not happen, he focused on xAI. The company has been developing Grok, its flagship AI model, which was integrated in Tesla vehicles in July.
Musk wrote in a X post earlier this year that Tesla investing in xAI was not up to him, as “if it was up to me, Tesla would have invested in xAI long ago. We will have a shareholder vote on the matter.”
The billionaire also rejected speculation about a merger between Tesla and xAI.
Responding to a post asking Tesla investors whether they supported such a deal, Musk replied simply: “No.”
