When Tesla reincorporated from Delaware to Texas in June 2024, Musk told shareholders it was about escaping hostile courts. What he didn’t mention: Texas was already the home base for a personal empire of shell companies that blur the lines between his public and private interests in ways that should worry every Tesla investor.

The Fact: A New York Times investigation published today identified at least 90 Musk-linked companies in Texas, with 37 serving personal interests including land purchases, luxury properties, and political campaign spending.
The EVXL Angle: Tesla moved to Texas to shield Musk from shareholder lawsuits. The same state now shields his personal spending from public scrutiny. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the same strategy applied twice.
The Investor Impact: Musk’s personal LLCs, his business subsidiaries, and his political spending entities operate from overlapping Texas infrastructure, with shared personnel and shared addresses. Tesla shareholders have no mechanism to challenge conflicts of interest under the company’s Texas bylaws.

Texas gave Musk the 3% lawsuit shield. The NYT shows why that matters now.

In 2018, a Tesla shareholder named Richard Tornetta owned nine shares when he filed the lawsuit that eventually voided Musk’s $56 billion pay package. A Delaware judge found that Tesla’s board had failed its duty to shareholders and that Musk had controlled the board members rather than negotiating at arm’s length. Musk’s response was to move Tesla to Texas, where the state legislature had conveniently passed a law letting companies set ownership thresholds for derivative lawsuits. Tesla adopted a 3% floor. At today’s market cap, that means you’d need over $30 billion in Tesla stock to bring a similar challenge.

That legal shield looked like corporate governance maneuvering. After today’s NYT investigation, it looks like something more. The Times found that Musk’s personal companies, his business subsidiaries, and his political spending entities are tangled together in a network where money flows through private LLCs that face no disclosure requirements. At least 15 of his companies, including his family office Excession LLC, share the same P.O. box in the Austin suburbs. His money manager Jared Birchall runs land-buying LLCs that are simultaneously tied to Neuralink. His longtime friend Antonio Gracias, who sat on Tesla’s board for over a decade before departing in 2021, manages a Delaware LLC that owns the luxury condos where Musk lived. Gracias then sold $168 million in Tesla stock in a single transaction last May.

Under Delaware law, a shareholder with nine shares could have challenged any of these entanglements. Under Texas law, only someone with $30 billion can try.

EVXL has tracked Tesla’s governance collapse for over a year. The NYT just added the missing piece.

We’ve been building this case from the Tesla shareholder perspective since 2024. Here’s the timeline that the NYT investigation now connects to a much larger pattern of opacity:

January 2024: Delaware court voids Musk’s $56 billion pay package, finding board failed fiduciary duties.
June 2024: Tesla reincorporates in Texas. Musk already has dozens of personal LLCs there, sharing infrastructure with his business entities.
January 2025: Full-year 2024 delivery figures confirm the first annual sales decline in Tesla’s history, dropping from 1.8 million to 1.7 million vehicles.
April 2025: Tesla reports Q1 2025 earnings with net income down 71% while Musk works from the White House on DOGE.
May 2025: Board chair Robyn Denholm sells another $32 million in Tesla stock. The NYT later reports she sold $180 million in just six months during Tesla’s worst brand crisis. Meanwhile, insiders including Kimbal Musk and Gracias sell a combined $199 million.
October 2025: A Yale study quantifies the “Musk partisan effect” at over 1 million lost U.S. sales. The NYT now reveals that the political activities driving those losses were funded through Musk’s personal LLC network in the same state where Tesla chose to reincorporate.
November 2025: Shareholders approve Musk’s nearly $1 trillion compensation package despite opposition from Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, CalPERS, ISS, and Glass Lewis. Under Texas law, Musk votes his own shares on his own pay. Under Delaware law, he couldn’t.
January 2026: BYD officially overtakes Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker by unit sales. Tesla deliveries drop 8.6% in a year where the global EV market grew 28%.
February 2026: The Epstein files reveal that both Elon and Kimbal Musk, who has sat on Tesla’s board since 2004, appear extensively in DOJ documents. Then the NYT publishes its LLC investigation, revealing the full scope of Musk’s private Texas empire.

The $80 million question Tesla’s board can’t answer

The NYT found that four Musk LLCs provided almost $80 million in services to America PAC during the 2024 campaign, using a structure that campaign finance experts say obscured where the money went. One of those entities, Europa 100 LLC, was originally set up to pay Musk’s nannies. It later paid America PAC’s treasurer a salary of up to $1 million.

Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, told the Times that the arrangement “undermines the spirit of the law” favoring transparency. Super PACs must disclose individual payments. Private companies don’t.

Here’s why Tesla shareholders should care. The political spending that flowed through these LLCs directly damaged the Tesla brand. The Yale study proved it. Our own reporting on Tesla’s European market share halving in 2025 proved it. European customers cited Musk’s politics as the primary reason for switching brands. Now we know those political activities were funded through a personal LLC network operating in the same Texas ecosystem as Tesla’s own corporate entities, managed by the same inner circle, and shielded by the same legal framework that protects Musk from shareholder challenges.

At any company with functioning governance, the board would demand clarity on these entanglements. Tesla’s board approved a trillion-dollar pay package instead.

EVXL’s Take

I wrote the initial breakdown of the NYT investigation this morning because the facts deserved fast coverage. But the real story isn’t the 90 companies or the 1,000 acres or the luxury condos. The real story is what this network means for the people who actually own Tesla stock.

Musk chose Texas for Tesla’s reincorporation because Texas protects CEOs from shareholders. The NYT just showed that the same state protects Musk’s personal spending from everyone. The same money manager, Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s personal land-buying LLCs also appears in Tesla-adjacent business filings. Fifteen of Musk’s companies share a single P.O. box alongside his family office. His friend Gracias managed Musk’s personal condos for years while serving on Tesla’s board, then sold $168 million in Tesla stock after departing.

None of this is illegal. The Times made that clear, and so do the legal experts they quoted. LLCs are standard tools for the ultra-wealthy. But “legal” and “good for Tesla shareholders” aren’t the same thing. When your CEO’s personal and political spending apparatus shares personnel and infrastructure with entities connected to your publicly traded company, and the legal jurisdiction has been specifically chosen to prevent shareholders from asking questions about it, that’s a governance structure designed to serve one person.

I expect this story to grow. The Times acknowledged the 90 companies are “most likely a small fraction” of Musk’s total network, with additional LLCs in California, Delaware, and Nevada. For Tesla shareholders, the question is simple: if Musk needed Texas law to protect his personal empire from scrutiny, what exactly is he protecting it from? By Q2 2026, I expect at least one institutional investor to file a formal governance inquiry citing this investigation. Whether Tesla’s Texas bylaws let it go anywhere is a different question entirely.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.