What do brain implants, space rockets and electric cars have in common?
Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire CEO, said he was open to joining his various companies under one umbrella, similar to Google’s shakeup five years ago.
“Good idea,” Musk wrote on Twitter after it was launched the idea by David Lee, Tesla investor and YouTuber. On Wednesday on Twitter, Lee suggested to Musk that he set up a holding company called “X” to be Tesla’s parent company, the space rocket manufacturer SpaceX, the tunneling equipment The Boring Company and the start of brain implants Neuralink.
It’s unclear whether Musk is seriously considering the move or just humoring one of his 41 million Twitter fans, as he often does.
Regardless, there is a notable precedent – Google formed a new parent company called Alphabet in 2015 to host its signature search engine and the operation of internet services alongside its various other companies, such as the autonomous car unit Waymo and the company DeepMind artificial intelligence
There are a lot of persistent questions about how Musk would perform a similar restructuring, such as whether Company X would be publicly traded as Tesla or privately owned as SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink.
But Lee says the move would make it easier for the world’s second-richest man to oversee his existing projects and start new ones. In addition, he noted, Musk already owns the domain name for X.com, an online bank he founded in 1999.
“This is not a move focused on raising market capital or stock prices,” Lee said on Twitter. “Rather, it is a movement focused on creating the structure so that Elon can continue to make big bets for humanity and have time to manage them.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. The stock price of the electric car maker rose about 2.7% to $ 663.61 as of 11:45 p.m.