Tesla Sent $573M to Musk's Private Companies

Introduction

Last June was a busy month for Musk's regulators. The FDA fired 20 people in the office overseeing Neuralink, OSHA closed its Tesla workplace safety investigation, and the DOJ dropped its immigration discrimination case against SpaceX. The NLRB settled around the same time, and the CFPB started firing up to 90% of its staff, the same staff that would have regulated X Money. All of those agencies report up the chain of an executive branch that was, at the time, being audited by an office Elon Musk personally ran. Two days ago, Tesla filed an amended 10-K disclosing that during the same year Musk was dismantling those agencies, Tesla's board approved $573.4 million in revenue flowing from the public company to his private ones.

How $573.4 Million Moves Without Anyone Calling It That

The $573.4M is not a single transaction. It's a year's worth of board-approved sales between Tesla and the constellation of private companies Musk controls, broken down across pages 26 through 28 of the 10-K/A's Related Person Transactions section.

Megapacks are the largest piece. Tesla recognized approximately $430.1 million in revenue from xAI in 2025 for its battery storage product, with another $78.1 million booked through February 2026. SpaceX paid Tesla approximately $143.3 million in 2025, "primarily for the sale of vehicles," per the filing. There's another $0.3 million in consulting income from xAI. Tesla itself paid approximately $24.8 million back to Musk's other companies: $11.4 million to SpaceX for licensing and support, $4 million to xAI for consulting, $3.3 million to advertise on X, and $4.8 million to a private security company the filing identifies only as "owned by Elon Musk." That security line jumped from $2.8 million the year before, a 71% increase in twelve months, and the filing notes Tesla's payment is only "a portion of the total cost." Who pays the rest isn't disclosed.

Taken individually, each transaction looks routine. Tesla's Audit Committee has a written Related Person Transactions Policy that requires it to review and approve any transaction over $120,000 where a related person has a material interest. The committee says it has reviewed each one. The 10-K/A says all transactions were conducted "at rates generally available to unaffiliated third parties." No single line item is material on its own, and the aggregate (the only frame in which the picture changes shape) is exactly what the disclosure regime isn't designed to surface.

SpaceX Bought 18% of Every Cybertruck Sold Last Quarter

The Cybertruck section of that $143.3 million number is where the picture stops being abstract. According to S&P Global Mobility registration data first reported by Bloomberg's Dana Hull and later detailed by Electrek, SpaceX registered 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025. That accounted for 18% of every Cybertruck registered in the United States that quarter. Add in xAI, the Boring Company, and Neuralink, and Musk-controlled entities accounted for roughly 19% of all Q4 Cybertruck registrations: 1,339 of 7,071. They bought another 158 in January 2026 and another 67 in February.

Without those intercompany purchases, the data shows Cybertruck registrations would have fallen approximately 51% year-over-year. Sam Fiorani at AutoForecast Solutions put it directly: "Tesla is running out of buyers for the Cybertruck." Tesla's original projection for the vehicle was 250,000 units a year. The current organic pace looks closer to 20,000.

A SpaceX engineer publicly framed the purchases as fleet replacement of aging gas-powered support vehicles. Aging fleet replacement doesn't usually mean one private rocket company absorbing a fifth of a publicly traded model line during a demand collapse, in the exact window Tesla needed a clean quarterly number.

Shareholders Said No. The Board Wrote a $2 Billion Check Anyway.

In September 2025, Tesla's board put Proposal Seven on the proxy: should Tesla be authorized to invest in xAI? Shareholders voted in November. The result, as reported by Bloomberg: 1.06 billion shares yes, 916.3 million no, 473 million abstain. Under Tesla's bylaws, abstentions count as no votes. The proposal failed.

Six weeks later, on January 16, 2026, Tesla's board entered into an agreement to invest approximately $2.00 billion in xAI's Series E preferred stock anyway. The vote was advisory and nonbinding, and the board's own proxy language (included verbatim in the September DEF 14A) had told shareholders in advance that it would "ultimately determine and implement financial strategies related to artificial intelligence... in a manner that is consistent with its fiduciary duties."

Then the deal changed shape. On February 2, 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI Holdings outright. Tesla's preferred-stock purchase right converted into SpaceX Class A common stock. Tesla completed the $2.00 billion investment on March 12, 2026. So Tesla shareholders, through a vote that failed and a purchase they didn't approve, became minority shareholders in a private rocket company that Musk controls with roughly 79% voting power and owns about 42% of personally.

In February, Musk publicly told an all-hands meeting that xAI "was not built right first time around" and was "being rebuilt from the foundations up." Of the company's 12 co-founders, 10 had departed by mid-March. Tesla shareholders are now locked into $2 billion of private SpaceX equity, bought into a company the founder is publicly tearing down to studs, after a shareholder vote that rejected the whole idea.

Who Benefits

Per the FY2025 10-K/A's beneficial ownership table, Musk holds approximately 20.3% of Tesla through direct ownership and exercisable options. His SpaceX stake is reportedly around 42%, with about 79% voting control. His xAI ownership is undisclosed but is publicly known to be a controlling stake. When Tesla's board approves $430.1 million in Megapack sales to xAI, Musk earns roughly 20 cents of every dollar as Tesla's largest shareholder, then captures a much larger share on the receiving end through the private companies he controls more completely. The $143.3 million SpaceX paid for Cybertrucks works the same way: Tesla shareholders book the revenue at one ownership ratio, Musk books the underlying value at a far more favorable one. And the $2 billion equity investment converts public-shareholder cash into a minority stake in a private company where Musk's voting control is decisive.

Cover comes from how the disclosure regime is built. Each transaction is sized to fall below materiality, each one passes arm's-length review by the Audit Committee, and the 10-K/A discloses every dollar, item by item, in compliance with SEC rules. But aggregating those items into a single picture (the $573.4M in revenue, the $24.8M in expenses, the $2B equity investment, the 1,279 Cybertruck bailout, the 12,000 H100 GPUs Musk redirected from Tesla to X in 2023, the 50+ Tesla engineers reassigned to Twitter in 2022) isn't something any single regulator does or any single filing requires.

Then there's the power layer. Senator Warren's June 2025 report documented that Musk's companies faced at least $2.37 billion in pending federal enforcement liability before Trump took office. Many of those enforcement actions have stalled or been dismissed. Musk had business interests before more than 70% of agencies DOGE targeted. Pentagon contracts were getting cut while SpaceX received a Space Force launch contract worth up to $5.9 billion. The FAA reportedly explored canceling a $2.4 billion Verizon contract to redirect it to Starlink. DOGE accessed Treasury's Federal Payment System, which contains financial data on Musk's private competitors.

The regulators who would normally aggregate the picture (NHTSA on the Cybertruck demand collapse, the SEC on related-party transaction patterns, the EPA on SpaceX environmental violations, OSHA on Tesla workplace cases) are the same regulators DOGE has been hollowing out. Tesla's filings can stay technically compliant while the substance moves untouched, because the agencies that would interpret the substance aren't staffed to do so.

What the Lawsuits and the Pay Package Don't Settle

Three derivative lawsuits brought by Tesla shareholders in May and June 2024, alleging breach of fiduciary duty around X Corp and xAI dealings, were dismissed by the Delaware Court of Chancery on April 13, 2026. The dismissal was on procedural grounds: Tesla had moved its corporate domicile to Texas, and a forum bylaw now requires shareholder cases to be filed there. The court didn't rule on the merits, and plaintiffs can refile in Texas.

The Delaware Supreme Court did reinstate Musk's voided 2018 pay package in December 2025, which is a partial vindication of the board's broader relationship with Musk. The 2018 package isn't the same fact pattern as the 2025 intercompany flows, though. Reinstating an old comp award doesn't address a year's worth of new related-party transactions, a failed shareholder vote, and a $2 billion equity investment that converted into a minority stake in a private company. No court has ruled on whether the 2025 conduct survives the same scrutiny.

The FY2025 10-K does quietly settle one earlier defense Tesla used to make. The FY2024 risk factor explicitly named DOGE as one of the outside ventures distracting Musk from Tesla. The FY2025 10-K removed that language entirely, and a search for "Department of Government Efficiency" in the new filing returns zero hits. Musk's reported last day at DOGE was May 30, 2025, so part of that is procedural cleanup. But Tesla's own legal team also clearly stopped wanting the DOGE-era conflict on the page.

What Compliance Actually Constrains

There's a defense for almost every individual transaction in the 10-K/A. Megapacks sold to xAI generated $145 million in gross profit for Tesla shareholders, SpaceX has a legitimate need for support vehicles, the Audit Committee meets, and the arm's-length pricing language is in the contracts. Each defense holds at the line-item level. Put the line items together — the volume, the timing, the overridden vote, the gutted regulators all in one frame — and the defenses stop doing the work they're supposed to do.

So if a publicly traded company can route hundreds of millions in annual revenue through its CEO's private companies, override a failed shareholder vote on a $2 billion equity investment, and do all of it inside the disclosure rules while the federal regulators with jurisdiction get gutted by the same CEO, what's corporate governance actually constraining? The Tesla 10-K/A passes every line of the rulebook.