Comment by rurp

It's clearly the latter goal, but he just needs to be able to extract money from Tesla rather than keep it going well indefinitely. He's still fighting to get his unprecedented >$50B payout (more money than the company has made selling cars in its entire history). After that he'll try to extract more 10s of billions, like he had started before the courts got in his way. Once he's sucked enough money out of the company he'll move onto other fresher pursuits.