Elon Musk has quietly raised the prospect of merging SpaceX and Tesla with colleagues, according to people familiar with the conversations who declined to be named given the sensitivity of the matter.
The timing is pointed: Musk is set to kick off SpaceX’s Nasdaq roadshow this week, taking a company privately valued at $1.25 trillion to public markets and putting the question of what comes next squarely on the table.
A formal combination would produce one of the largest corporate entities ever assembled. Tesla’s market cap sits at roughly $1.6 trillion, meaning a merged company would notionally clear $2.8 trillion. A SpaceX listing on its own would already put Musk in charge of two of the ten most valuable U.S. enterprises simultaneously. A merger would collapse them into one.
The two companies are already more financially entangled than most investors may realise. SpaceX’s IPO prospectus discloses that it purchased $697 million worth of Tesla Megapack battery energy storage systems over a two year period to power xAI data centers in Tennessee, and spent a further $131 million on Tesla Cybertrucks in 2025 at retail price levels.
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Tesla, meanwhile, invested $2 billion in xAI in January; those shares converted into SpaceX holdings the following month when SpaceX completed its merger with xAI, the artificial intelligence company that also encompasses X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The financial ties extend beyond the prospectus. Prior transactions between the two companies include Tesla selling solar equipment and car parts to SpaceX, Tesla using SpaceX private jets, and SpaceX developing a special alloy for the Cybertruck. A current Tesla employee told CNBC that a SpaceX-Tesla combination has been openly discussed inside the EV maker for years and that workers have long expected it. A person close to Tesla added that shared constraints around power and compute have driven regular collaboration between the two companies.
Board-level overlap would add another layer of complexity to any deal structuring. Musk sits on both boards alongside Ira Ehrenpreis, founder of DBL Partners. SpaceX directors Antonio Gracias and Steve Jurvetson previously held Tesla board seats. Musk’s brother Kimbal currently serves on Tesla’s board and formerly directed SpaceX. Charles Kuehmann holds the vice president of materials engineering role at both companies simultaneously, having joined from Apple roughly a decade ago.
Capital commitments on both sides show no sign of pausing. More than three-quarters of SpaceX’s $10.1 billion in capital expenditures in the first quarter were directed toward AI, and SpaceX has an agreement on the table to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion. Tesla’s spending trajectory is equally steep: the company said in its latest earnings report that capex will roughly triple this year, topping $25 billion.
Neither SpaceX nor Tesla responded to requests for comment.
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