Just being tangentially related to the company isn't enough to justify it imo. You could also buy a lot of twitter ads for the cost of having devs come over.

I guess that’s the concept of a CEO, to decide if it is justified. He will answer to the board and shareholders.

Doesn't USA have the tax concept of "transfer pricing"?

Musk (who is definitely the beneficial owner of Twitter and probably of Tesla too) is providing "free" consulting service of Tesla employees for Twitter -> without an invoice and without tax. (or maybe there will be an invoice?)

In EU that should be taxed (and also invoiced) - with similar prices as a consulting provided by a consulting company that does code reviews. The tax office is interested most in the missing tax of course.

Is it confirmed that it is "free" consulting service? The article didn't mention anything about it.

> Later, people inside the company reported that Tesla engineers were in fact reviewing the code.

There’s very little here to make any kind of judgement from.

Perhaps they were being paid for some private work outside of their employment. Maybe there’s some kind of arrangement in place to cover the costs of their time. From the outside we simply don’t know.

Quite sure this is just false, as I've done this in some contexts before, would be great to hear from an eypert. - Consulting pro bono, even during hours on another company should generally be fine, it might just make it more likely to be tax audited.

I think the key point is whether the companies are at arms length or not, not that it is pro-bono.

Devs are salaried. If they're doing nothing else than the effective cost of contracting them out to Twitter is zero

What do you mean by push? Tesla already doesn't run ads, this would be a strange way to start.

All he has to do is tweet something about Tesla... instant advertising.

He tweeted all sorts of ridiculous nonsense, to include talking about Tesla, long before he bought twitter

Well, he could already do that.

>Tesla already doesn't run ads

That is a great idea, running ads in Tesla cars. They can introduce a monthly subscription to opt out of the ads.

Now that the words have been uttered its become inevitable

I thought that was already obvious when Google started working on cars ;-)