Charles Elson

And obviously, the venture has become so successful.

You've got a competing venture who you expect will be successful.

You created a company that you had your Tesla shareholders invest in, even though they thought when they bought into Tesla, they were buying into AI.

And it kind of leaves you scratching your head a little bit as to what is really going on.

Is there really a nonprofit purpose in this or something else?

It was interesting, many, many years ago, there's a very famous corporate law case involving Henry Ford.

And Henry Ford stopped paying dividends in his company, Ford Motor Company, or reduced his special dividends, large dividends, claiming that he thought he had made too much money and that instead the country itself should enjoy the prosperity that he created through lower car prices, greater employee salaries, things like that.

And the court said, no, a business is a business to make a profit, and your investors expected that from you.

Well, that was the surface story.

The underlying story, as it turns out, was that the investors who complained whose dividends he cut off, well, he cut off everyone's, but it was one particular group with two brothers named Dodge.

And they were using the money to create the Dodge Motor Company, a competitor to Ford.

And so it was argued that this really wasn't a case about the purpose of the corporation.

It really was effectively an antitrust case.

In other words, there was more to the tale.

And on this one, there may be more to this tale too.

Again, that's what the jury is supposed to figure out, what the judge is supposed to help the jury figure out.

And we'll have to see.

It's an odd one in that respect.

I agree with Mr. Musk that the thing started as a nonprofit and it's sort of morphed into a profit.

But it'd be very hard to keep it as a nonprofit given what it's involved in.