Elon Musk has said he supports the idea of merging Tesla with SpaceX, confirming that both companies have formed special committees of independent directors to study a combination that would reshape the corporate map.
Musk disclosed the committees on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, saying they were set up at shareholders’ request and had not agreed on any terms. He said he could not take part in the discussions because he was a conflicted party, calling it an odd kabuki dance.
He pushed back on suggestions a deal was certain: some people assumed a merger was a certainty, and that would be overstating it, he said. On Tesla’s side, any deal would need approval from 50 percent of all outstanding shares, not just those voted, a threshold he called quite a high hurdle.
Why Musk likes the idea
Musk said the case for combining rested on shared work in superintelligence software, chip design, the Terafab semiconductor project, robotics and getting mass to orbit for the satellite network. SpaceX shares rose about 5 percent in after-hours trading after his remarks.
The comments came as SpaceX reported its first quarterly profit since going public: net income of 4.4 billion dollars for the July to September quarter, against a loss of 1.1 billion a year earlier, on revenue up 161 percent to 14.6 billion. Its Super Intelligence segment generated 7.6 billion, an 830 percent increase, making it the largest contributor.
A demanding road to any deal
Even Musk’s enthusiasm comes with caveats. The committees must first agree terms, then clear what would likely be months of review, then win over Tesla shareholders at that demanding 50 percent bar. Some estimates put a combined entity near 3.5 trillion dollars, but that figure is market speculation, not an agreed value.
The episode sits alongside a busy week for AI dealmaking, from OpenAI’s enterprise push onto Google Cloud to Wall Street’s embrace of tokenised trading. For now, the merger is an idea with a process around it, as this report notes, and the next signal will come from the committees, not from Musk himself.
