[gpm]

The more straightforward explanation is that it's a story that Elon (probably correctly) thinks will sound good to wall-street and enable him to take a ton of the publics money when SpaceX IPOs and gets added to the S&P for himself.

In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.

[notahacker]

As an investment narrative it was ideal to justify rolling Elon's unprofitable second tier AI company and the debt-ridden mess he made of Twitter into his highly successful space company, ensuring the investors in those get paid off by the SpaceX IPO...