> Could just be a way to let it die without loss of face. An odd way to save face: promoting it to a listed company whose financials they are going to have to

> Could just be a way to let it die without loss of face. An odd way to save face: promoting it to a listed company whose financials they are going to have to regularly provide information on? This makes it higher profile and provides more documentation on any demise. If they wanted to save face, the right thing to do would be to keep it as part of the research division to continue burying its expenses as part of aggregates, slash it, and a few years from now post on an obscure blog "we are pleased at the success of the many self-driving car companies which followed our groundbreaking results, and consider our goals achieved; hence, we will be deleting all our websites related to that a year from now".