Tesla shareholders have sued CEO Elon Musk and the board of directors over the billionaire's decision to found xAI.
According to the plaintiffs, the startup is a competitor of the company in the field of artificial intelligence, "taking away the talents and resources of the automaker." According to the document, at least 11 Tesla employees left for xAI, and the company provided the latter with access to its AI-related data.
"Musk and members of the Tesla board of directors violated fiduciary duties to protect the interests of shareholders and unfairly enriched the entrepreneur by allowing him to launch a competing company. Musk violated the Tesla code of business ethics by creating and heading xAI, and the board of directors did not prevent this," the lawsuit says.
Shareholders also drew attention to the fact that Musk redirected a significant batch of Nvidia AI processors intended for Tesla to his other company, X. Then Musk admitted that otherwise the chips "would just be in stock."
Tesla had no place to send the Nvidia chips to turn them on, so they would have just sat in a warehouse.
The south extension of Giga Texas is almost complete. This will house 50k H100s for FSD training.
The plaintiffs are demanding that Musk give up his stake in xAI and transfer it to Tesla.
Musk launched the startup in 2023. In April 2024, it became known that the project had raised $6 billion with an estimate of $18 billion. According to marketing materials, Musk plans to collect training data from all of his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company and Neuralink.
On June 13, at the shareholders' meeting, Musk boasted about Tesla's achievements in the field of AI, including software and chip development.
"In fact, there is no chip from Nvidia or any other company that would be better for our machines. We started from scratch in the development of chips, just as we started from scratch in the development of artificial intelligence software. We have the best AI software in the world and the best AI chip in the world — from scratch," the entrepreneur said (quoted by Decrypt).
Recall, according to Musk, Optimus humanoid robots will bring Tesla's capitalization to $ 25 trillion.