From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
Elon Musk said Tuesday that SpaceX and Tesla have each formed special committees of independent directors to study a merger, though no terms have been agreed.
A combined company worth roughly $3.5 trillion would own the Grok chatbot, X, Starlink, the Terafab chip project, the Starmind orbital data center plan, and Tesla's robotaxi and Optimus businesses.
Any deal needs the backing of 50% of all outstanding Tesla shares, which Musk called "quite a high hurdle," and Tesla's annual meeting is set for December 3.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that the boards of SpaceX and Tesla have each formed special committees to study merging his two biggest companies, a deal that would put rockets, electric cars, humanoid robots, a social network and the Grok chatbot inside a single corporation worth roughly $3.5 trillion.
“I do think there’s a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity,” Musk said on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call. The singularity is Silicon Valley shorthand for the point where AI outsmarts humans and starts improving itself faster than anyone can keep up.
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He then listed what the two companies would share: “superintelligence software, chip design, the Terafab obviously, robotics, mass-to-orbit with the Starmind constellation, connectivity.”
In plain English, that means AI models, custom chips, a giant chip factory, robots, and satellites that work as data centers in orbit.
If it happens, one company—with one man holding the majority of its votes—would own a leading AI chatbot, the social network that feeds it data, the satellites that connect it, the factory that makes its chips, and the cars and robots it is meant to drive.
Nothing has been signed and Musk warned that assuming a merger is a certainty “would be overstating it.” If you own an S&P 500 index fund, you already hold a sliver of Tesla—not SpaceX—and in an all-stock deal those shares would likely be swapped for stock in the combined company.
It would be Musk’s third consolidation since March 2025, when xAI absorbed X (formerly Twitter). In February, SpaceX swallowed xAI in a deal valuing the AI company at $250 billion, weeks after Tesla put about $2 billion into it; in June, SpaceX went public in the largest IPO ever.
SpaceX reported third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion on Tuesday, well above the $12.72 billion analysts expected. It also booked its first quarterly profit since going public, largely by renting the computing power of its AI server farms to firms such as Anthropic and Google.
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