My personal theory about all of this is that it feels like someone went "we want to do X in 2025" and that the three musk companies were launched separately to

My personal theory about all of this is that it feels like someone went "we want to do X in 2025" and that the three musk companies were launched separately to achieve those goals because the complexity of arguing them together would not have been conductive of fundraising. This is going to seem super nit-picky but SpaceX was and is still a privately owned company. If the board was aware of the decision to purchase these bonds then the act was completely above board. There are lots of things we tell our selves about the legalities of how companies should be run. But most of those mythologies are based on the regulation of publicly traded companies. Privately traded companies can and do play these types of financial shell games constantly. Sadly I don't feel like there is much recourse for Tesla shareholders here. Even if you could prove some sort of far ranging conspiracy, there was an up down vote on the merger. Additionally the merger it self was a stock swap and not a cash acquisition. Calling the merger a mistake is fair but my sense when you look at the positions held by musk and others I think that is unlikely a broader fraud happened here. Musk owns 1/3rd of Tesla and because Tesla is publicly traded (unlike spaceX) this 1/3rd ownership stake represents most of Musk's financial liquidity. Based on the 2016 market Cap of Tesla (somewhere between 20 and 60 billion) it seems highly unlikely that Musk would encourage a merger just to gain the additional 800 or so million in Tesla stock he was given for his solar city stock.