Other examples include Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, which receives the payments from Google for default search engine placement and hires Firefox engineers, and the Smithsonian museum gift shop. It’s a very common corporate structure for nonprofits that run some kind of business because it derisks accounting and management.

Musk is offering to buy the forprofit from the nonprofit, which would mean a $97.4 billion endowment for the latter to carry out their mission. It’s not necessarily a bad deal because it converts an optimistic VC valuation into hard assets, unless the rumored new round at a $300 billion valuation with Softbank is true.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...