Emails circulating at Nvidia show that Elon Musk asked them to prioritize processor shipments to X over Tesla.
Amid concerns that Elon Musk is not fulfilling his fiduciary duties to Tesla shareholders, a new report from CNBC reveals that the CEO told NVIDIA to prioritize processor deliveries to X over Tesla.
The publication released an Nvidia memo from December showed that Musk asked to divert a shipment of GPUs meant for Tesla to X:
Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.
Shortly after this email, Musk said that Tesla would spend about $10 billion on computing power to train its AI this year.
The new report today also highlighted a more recent Nvidia email that claims that Musk’s statement “conflicts with bookings and FY 2025 forecasts.”
Other Nvidia emails obtained by CNBC also reference the fact that Musk is trying to secure GPUs for xAI’s project to build the “world’s largest cluster,” planned to start going online in June.
Top comment by CMG30
Even taking Elon at his word, what's clear is that Elon views all of his businesses in which he is owner or CEO as different arms of one entity. Resources (labour/talent/materials/capital) then flow from the most profitable areas of the 'company' to the area's that Elon is trying to build up. The problem is that the area that is the profit centre is Tesla, which is is publicly traded and not owned by Elon. Net effect is that Elon is enriching the private areas at the expense of the publicly traded one.
A business with proper governance would have stopped this immediately.
Update: Elon has commented and as anticipated below, he says that Tesla was not ready to take delivery:
Electrek’s Take
To play devil’s advocate, there’s a chance that Tesla was not ready to take delivery of that compute power.
We previously reported that Tesla is looking to build a giant 100 MW cluster at Gigafactory Texas, but the project has fallen behind schedule, and it is now aimed for August, according to sources.
Either way, the simple fact that Elon can ask Nvidia to prioritize shipment to his other privately owned companies rather than publicly-held Tesla shows that the conflicts of interest are real and tesla needs proper governance and oversight of its CEO more than ever..
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