Musk’s Rocket Company Helped Him Dig Tunnels

Well, Elon Musk, who we mostly talk about these days for his casual approach to securities regulation at his public company, Tesla Inc. (which previously and controversially bought his other public company, SolarCity Corp.), also apparently used resources from one of his private companies, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., to build a tunnel for his other private company, the Boring Co., so I guess you’d have to say the answer is no?

SpaceX got a little Boring equity (6 percent) for its help, but “the SpaceX board never voted on devoting resources to Mr. Musk’s new venture” and “SpaceX hasn’t formally notified its investors of the exchange.” At a normal (public) company, never mind the board, there’d be a special committee of independent directors to vote on whether to devote corporate resources to the chief executive officer’s personal side project, and on what terms, and also on whether to let him pursue for-profit side projects at all. At SpaceX, the CEO just told employees to dig a tunnel for him, and they got digging. Apparently they didn’t even know it was a side project: “In an August 2017 visit, representatives of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health were told by the site safety manager — himself a SpaceX employee — he was ‘unsure whether TBC is a separate company or just a [unit] of SpaceX.’”