Speculation about a possible Tesla-SpaceX merger reignited on Tuesday after a Bloomberg opinion column argued that SpaceX’s planned public listing, valued by underwriting bankers at roughly $2 trillion, was structured in a way that would make a post-IPO combination of the two Musk-controlled companies straightforward. Tesla shares closed 4.6 percent higher on the day; SpaceX, still private, has no listed price.
SpaceX’s long-trailed IPO roadshow is scheduled to begin next week, with Elon Musk continuing in the unusual triple role of CEO, CTO and chairman. The flotation, originally targeted for late 2025 and delayed twice, is now widely expected by mid-July, with banker-led valuation conversations centred on a range of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who has been bullish on a merger since 2023, this week put the post-IPO probability of a Tesla-SpaceX combination at 80 percent and pencilled a target close of 2027 for any transaction. Ives argued that the two companies’ increasing convergence on AI infrastructure made a single capital pool and a single equity story “commercially obvious.”
Inside Tesla, a current employee told CNBC that the topic was openly discussed and that many staff had “long expected” such a transaction. The company has not formally addressed the speculation. The SpaceX side has been more guarded; its prospectus, lodged with the SEC in confidential form earlier this year, is expected to be made public next Monday.
On the operations side, SpaceX disclosed in a recent filing that more than three-quarters of its $10.1 billion in capital expenditure during the first quarter was tied to AI — covering the Colossus compute build-out that supports Musk’s xAI venture and an expanding Starlink-routed network for low-latency model inference. Roughly a similar share of Tesla’s most recent capex has gone to its Dojo training cluster and to Optimus humanoid robot development.
For Tesla shareholders, a merger would solve a long-running question about the conglomerate discount that the company is widely seen as carrying because of Musk’s split attention; for SpaceX shareholders — a much smaller group, dominated by Founders Fund, Sequoia and 8VC — it would represent a partial exit by way of public-market liquidity.
Tesla in parallel launched its Full Self-Driving service in China this week, with regulatory clearance now in place across ten countries where Supervised FSD is offered. Two low-speed Tesla Supervised robotaxi crashes were reported in Austin over the weekend; the company said both occurred without passengers and without injuries.