Tesla and SpaceX form committees to examine a potential Musk-led merger

Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to examine a possible merger, Elon Musk said during a SpaceX quarterly results call. He described a combination as potentially valuable but warned that the companies had not agreed terms and that shareholders would ultimately decide whether it could proceed. Musk, who leads both companies, said he was not participating in the committee discussions because he was a conflicted party.

He said a merger should not be treated as certain, even though he believed there was “a lot of merit” in bringing the businesses together. The proposed deal would unite Tesla’s electric vehicles, energy and robotics operations with SpaceX’s rockets, Starlink satellite internet and expanding computing business. Musk said cooperation could benefit work involving artificial intelligence, software and computer chips, including the companies’ shared ambitions around what he called superintelligence.

The scale would be exceptional. The South China Morning Post valued SpaceX at about $2tn and Tesla at nearly $1.5tn. The BBC described a combined company as one of the largest mergers in history.

Those figures are reported valuations, not an agreed transaction price. Musk said Tesla would need approval from at least 50% of all shareholders rather than merely a majority of those voting. He characterised that as a high hurdle and said the special committees had not reached agreement on the terms of any transaction.

The reports do not identify a timetable for their work. The companies already have several commercial and organisational links. The South China Morning Post reported that SpaceX had bought more than $100m of Tesla Cybertrucks, while xAI was a major customer for Tesla’s utility-scale batteries.

The BBC also cited Terafab, a joint Tesla-SpaceX effort to manufacture computer chips. SpaceX is expanding beyond launches and Starlink into cloud computing for companies including Anthropic and Google. The BBC reported that cloud computing generated $7.5bn in the latest quarterly results and Starlink produced $5.2bn, while SpaceX overall remained unprofitable and had lost $1.1bn so far this year.

Market reactions differed between the reports. The South China Morning Post said SpaceX shares rose 4.6% after the results and Tesla gained 1.2%; the BBC reported rises of 8% and 2% respectively in after-hours trading. The discrepancy may reflect different points during trading or reporting, and neither account establishes that the movements were caused solely by merger discussions.

Musk has increasingly combined activities across his companies, including SpaceX’s earlier acquisition of xAI and X, formerly Twitter, according to the BBC. But the proposed Tesla-SpaceX tie-up remains exploratory: there are committees, no agreed terms and a shareholder vote still required.