alt Hacker NewsThe more straightforward explanation is that it's a story that Elon (probably correctly) thinks will sound good to wall-street and enable him to take a ton of the publics money when SpaceX IPOs and gets added to the S&P for himself.
In other words good old fashioned plausibly deniable securities fraud.
As an investment narrative it was ideal to justify rolling Elon's unprofitable second tier AI company and the debt-ridden mess he made of Twitter into his highly successful space company, ensuring the investors in those get paid off by the SpaceX IPO...