Elon Musk (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Thick as Thieves

Musk’s xAI paid Musk’s Tesla nearly $200 million last year

That’s 2% of Tesla’s energy revenue.

5/5/25 11:13AM

Tesla’s transactions with Elon Musk’s other companies are getting bigger.

Last week while Amazon and Apple were reporting tech earnings, Tesla quietly amended its annual filing to say that the company would no longer be issuing its proxy statement within 120 days of the end of its fiscal calendar year (that night) because its board hadn’t yet picked a date for the company’s shareholder meeting. It did, however, include some of the information normally found in that proxy statement in the amendment, including related-party transactions.

Often the most interesting part of a company’s annual proxy statement, that section is where companies are required to list business arrangements with individuals or entities that might pose a conflict of interest. That’s especially the case for Tesla, whose CEO Musk also runs four other companies — SpaceX, The Boring Co., Neuralink, and the combined X and xAI — and who has a habit of funneling money between them.

The interconnection of Musk’s companies and himself is getting even more entrenched.

The newest addition to this section is also its biggest. Last year, xAI paid $198.3 million to Tesla, the vast majority of which went to the purchase of Tesla Megapacks, battery storage systems that help power xAI’s data centers.

For context, last year Tesla’s energy generation and storage segment brought in about $10 billion in revenue, so the xAI payments account for nearly 2% of that. This filing was the first where Tesla mentioned transactions with xAI, which was founded in 2023.

Unlike Tesla’s car business, which shrunk last year, Tesla’s energy business is growing rapidly and more profitable.

Tesla’s relationships with other related companies are getting cozier, too.

From 2023 to 2024, SpaceX’s payments to Tesla for commercial, licensing, and support agreements grew from $2.1 million to $2.4 million. In that time, Tesla’s payments to SpaceX for Musk’s jet use grew from $700,000 to $800,000.

Tesla’s payments to X for commercial, consulting, and support agreements doubled from $50,000 to $100,000 from 2023 to 2024. Tesla also paid X $400,000 for advertising in 2024, while previously Tesla had paid X $200,000 for ads through February 2024.

Tesla increased its spending with The Boring Company to $3.6 million last year from $200,000 in 2023 — money that likely went toward a tunnel that connects the Texas factory where Cybertrucks are produced to their loading lot.

Last year, Tesla made $30.3 million selling scrap to Redwood Materials, a company that’s owned by Tesla cofounder and board member JB Straubel, up from $11.5 million in 2023. Tesla also paid $300,000 to Musk’s brother’s company, Nova Sky Stories, for a drone show. Tesla paid Musk’s own security company $2.8 million for security services in 2024, up from $2.4 million a year earlier.

Jon Keegan23h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

Meta weighs big equity raising after blockbuster Google deal

Rani Molla

6/5/26

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan6/5/26

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla6/5/26

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.