Is Elon Musk really planning to merge SpaceX with Tesla?

Is Elon Musk really planning to put SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA) under one roof? It’s all anyone’s talking about on Wall Street, in executive offices, regarding AI expenditure, rockets, and some strange family tree of businesses.

SpaceX is getting ready for a Nasdaq listing in a little over two weeks, after hitting a private value of $1.25 trillion earlier this year through its merger with xAI. Tesla is already worth about $1.6 trillion.

The merger talk did not come out of nowhere, because allegedly, Elon has already spoken with colleagues about combining the companies.

One current Tesla employee reportedly told CNBC that many workers inside the EV company have expected this kind of deal for years, and that staff talk about it openly.

Tesla and SpaceX already share boards, engineers, cash, batteries, trucks, and AI infrastructure

Relationships between Tesla and SpaceX have many different aspects and are quite strong. Elon Musk serves on the boards of both firms. Another individual, who is a board member for both, is Ira Ehrenpreis, who founded DBL Partners. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother, is currently on the Tesla board and was previously a SpaceX director. Additionally, Antonio Gracias and Steve Jurvetson were board members of Tesla before switching their allegiance to SpaceX.

Staff relationships are rather evident too. For example, Charles Kuehmann is vice president of materials engineering for both companies. He moved from Apple ten years ago. Since then, he works on solving engineering challenges in large-scale hardware projects. This type of job is relevant because material science, heat exchange, weights, battery safety, manufacturing pressures, and hard engineering problems cannot be overcome with an inspiring speech.

Financial relations between SpaceX and Tesla cannot be denied either. In January, Tesla said that it had invested $2 billion in xAI, Elon’s artificial intelligence company. One month later, SpaceX and xAI merged, thus making Tesla’s investment in xAI stock linked to SpaceX. Therefore, Tesla established financial connection with SpaceX before any stock market listing.

SpaceX also buys a lot from Tesla. According to its prospectus, in 2024 and 2025, the company plans to spend $697 million to buy Tesla Megapack batteries, which will power the data centers owned and operated by xAI around its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. This is not merely an internal order but hundreds of millions worth of battery hardware for AI compute capacity.

According to the prospectus, SpaceX will also spend $131 million in purchasing Tesla Cybertrucks at listed retail prices.

Lawyers said a Tesla-SpaceX merger would probably not create a big antitrust fight because the companies do not mainly sell the same thing. Shareholders would have questions: Which company becomes the parent? What exchange ratio would investors get? Who decides the correct value for each side? Those are not small details when one company is valued at $1.25 trillion and the other is worth around $1.6 trillion.

For SpaceX, Elon controls about 85% of the voting power there, so he controls every major company decision.

SpaceX receives billions in military funding from Trump administration

In an attempt to create a secure military satellite network, the United States Space Force provided SpaceX with a $2.29 billion deal to develop an architecture known as the Space Data Network Backbone (SDN Backbone).

This new architecture will interconnect military sensors, missile-warning systems, tracking capabilities, and weapon delivery platforms. The plan is to allow fast, secure, and high-capacity data transfer between platforms and sensors with minimal latency. The space force hopes for a prototype of the architecture by 2027.

The SDN Backbone project has connections to missile defense projects that have been developed under the Golden Dome project from the Trump administration. The network is aimed at making sure that the data gathered from the missile warning and tracking sensors are relayed to interceptors in near real time.

Cryptopolitan earlier reported that Elon Musk will get $1 trillion if he achieves certain things at SpaceX. These things are; attaining market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and settling more than 1 million humans on Mars.

Similarly, Tesla has a large pay plan for Elon Musk, which is composed of 12 stages depending on market cap and operational achievements.