One Elon, one potential ticker: SpaceX and Tesla weigh a $3.5 trillion merger

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 place rockets, electric cars, humanoid robots, a social network and the Grok chatbot inside one corporation worth roughly $3.5 trillion.

On SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call, Musk said, “I do think there’s a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity.” The singularity is Silicon Valley shorthand for the point where AI outsmarts humans and starts improving itself faster than anyone can keep up. He listed what the companies would share: “superintelligence software, chip design, the Terafab obviously, robotics, mass-to-orbit with the Starmind constellation, connectivity.” In practical terms, that means AI models, custom chips, a giant chip factory, robots and satellites that work as data centers in orbit. Nothing has been signed, and Musk warned that assuming a merger is a certainty “would be overstating it.”

If completed, the combined company—with Musk 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. An S&P 500 index fund already holds a sliver of Tesla—not SpaceX—and in an all-stock deal those shares would likely be swapped for stock in the combined company. The proposal would be Musk’s third consolidation since March 2025, when xAI absorbed X (formerly Twitter). In February, SpaceX absorbed 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, and 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. At the center of its orbital plan is Starmind, which would place AI data centers in orbit. SpaceX has asked U.S. regulators to approve up to 1 million satellites that would run AI models on near-constant sunlight. Musk expects deployments to start in late 2027 and reach “significant scale” in 2028.

Musk’s argument is that Earth is running out of room and electricity for AI, while political conditions have added to the challenge. An Annenberg survey found 61% of Americans now oppose new data centers in their area, and roughly $130 billion in projects were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 alone. SpaceX’s own IPO paperwork warned investors that orbital AI computing relies on “unproven technologies” and “may not achieve commercial viability.” Tesla’s main contribution would be Terafab, a $16.8 billion chip factory the two companies are building in Texas to supply Optimus robots, Cybercab robotaxis and those space data centers.