This isn't even a theoretical concern and it goes well beyond unfettered control of a single company. Look at the history:

1. One of Elon's companies (Tesla) bought out another of Elon's companies (Solar City) that was going bankrupt because it owed a lot of money to yet another of Elon's companies (SpaceX) [1];

2. Elon diverted $500M of NVidia H100 GPUs reserved for Tesla to xAI [2];

3. Elon made a buyout agreement for Twitter then tried to back out. Twitter sued (for specific performance) and a Delaware judge agreed. Elon completed the purchase before the court ordered him to [3]. That purchase was secured by his Tesla shares. He ran Twitter into the ground and then created xAI in 2023 [4]. Both Tesla and SpaceX "invested" billions into it. Elon ultimately used the funds to buy out Twitter at an inflated price (and still less than he paid) [5]. He ultimately then bailed out the xAI investors by having SpaceX acquire xAI [6]. IMHO this made SpaceX a significantly worse company. It was also used to inflate the value of SpaceX by using some wildly optimistic made up numbers about the AI total addressable market; and

4. The Cybertruck has been an unmitigated financial disaster. It's a terrible car and sales are awful. But that's OK because Elon uses SpaceX to buy Cybertrucks [7].

At least with the Google founders and Mark Zuckerberg, they only had one company so they weren't playing corporate shell games or using it as a personal slush fund on this scale.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/technology/elon-musk-spac...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elon-musk-told-nvidia-to-shi...

[3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/06/1127346372/elon-musk-twitter-...

[4]: https://research.contrary.com/company/xai

[5]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...

[6]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6vnrye06po

[7]: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-bought-tesla-cybertru...

I'd like to point out something i learned the other day:

Alphabet owns some SpaceX shares, which makes Google's sudden 90-day compute contract with xAI seem a little less than coincidental