Musk Polls X Users: Should Tesla Invest in AI?

Elon Musk is asking users of his social media platform if his car company should invest in his AI platform.

The world’s richest man launched the non-binding, informal poll on X — formerly Twitter — late Tuesday (July 23), hours after saying during an earnings presentation that Tesla would continue its artificial intelligence (AI) investments.

“Should Tesla invest $5B into xAI, assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors?” he wrote.

Musk said the spending would need the approval of Tesla’s board and shareholders, “so this is just to test the waters.”

As of Wednesday (July 24) morning, the poll had more than 689,000 votes, 68% of which were in favor of the investment.

“We’re investing in many future projects, including AI training and inference and a great deal of infrastructure to support future products,” Musk said during the earnings call.

The company’s autonomy offerings powered by AI software and hardware include driver assistance features called FSD (Supervised), its humanoid robot Optimus, and its planned autonomous driving and robotaxi service.

During the call, Musk was asked whether Tesla would invest in xAi and integrate that company’s Grok software into its cars.

“Tesla is learning quite a bit from xAI. It’s been actually helpful in advancing Full Self-Driving and in building up the new Tesla data center,” Musk said. “With regards to investing in xAI, I think we’d need to have shareholder approval of such investment. But I’m certainly supportive of that if shareholders are.”

As PYMNTS reported, Tesla’s total revenues climbed 2% year over year, with automotive revenues falling 7%, energy generation and storage revenue rising by 100%, and its services and other revenue increasing 21%. However, the earnings also showed Tesla’s profits falling more than 40%, sending its stock down on Tuesday.

Musk launched xAI a little over a year ago, after months of hinting that he wanted to develop an alternative to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. He played a role in the creation of that company but stepped down from its board in 2018 and has since criticized OpenAI for departing from its original mission.

xAI announced in May it had raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round, giving it a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. The company said it would use the funding to take its first products to market, construct advanced infrastructure and accelerate its research and development.