Tesla and SpaceX merger: both boards form special committees, Musk says it is not certain

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that SpaceX and Tesla are looking at a merger, and that the boards of both companies have each set up a special committee of independent directors to study it. He spoke on SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call, which ended in the early hours of Wednesday in Pakistan.

Musk backed the idea but warned against treating it as done. "Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," he said, according to Cointelegraph. He also said that people who assume a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty are "overstating it".

What Musk said about the Tesla SpaceX merger

The committees were formed at shareholders' request, Musk said, and he cannot sit in on them. "Because I'm a conflicted party, I can't actually be in the discussions of the special committees," he said on the call, as reported by TechCrunch. He did not name the members, and the committees have not agreed on any terms.

His case for combining the two: shared work on AI software and robotics, SpaceX's orbital AI data centre project Starmind, and Terafab, the chip manufacturing project the two companies run together. Musk put the value of a combined company at roughly $3.5 trillion, about Rs 969 trillion at today's dollar rate.

The vote that decides it

Approval is the hard part, and it is harder at Tesla.

• SpaceX: Musk holds more than 50% of the voting power after the company's stock market listing, so a SpaceX vote is easier to win.
• Tesla: a merger would need the support of 50% of all Tesla shares, not just the shares that turn up to vote. Musk called that "quite a high hurdle".

Tesla's independent directors, listed in its 19 October proxy filing, include chair Robyn Denholm, Ira Ehrenpreis, JB Straubel, Joe Gebbia, Jack Hartung, James Murdoch and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson. Ehrenpreis also sits on the SpaceX board, where he chairs the compensation and nominating committee, TechCrunch noted.

SpaceX's quarter: AI is now its biggest business

The merger talk came with a strong set of SpaceX numbers. Cointelegraph reported third-quarter revenue of $14.6 billion (about Rs 4.04 trillion), up 161% on a year earlier. Revenue from the AI segment, which SpaceX calls Super Intelligence, rose 830% to $7.6 billion (about Rs 2.10 trillion), making it the company's largest business. The jump came from new cloud deals, the purchase of the coding tool Cursor and wider use of the Grok AI model. SpaceX took over X in February, and Grok's developer, formerly xAI, is now part of SpaceX.

Both companies also hold bitcoin: 18,712 BTC at SpaceX and 11,509 BTC at Tesla as of 30 June, per their filings. Together that is 30,221 BTC, worth about $2.5 billion at the latest bitcoin price.

What it means for readers in Pakistan

Neither company is listed in Pakistan, so the direct effect here is on readers who own Tesla shares through overseas brokerage apps and on the many who use X and Grok. A merger would put the cars, the rockets, Starlink, X and Grok under one listed company. Nothing changes yet: there is no deal, no price and no date, only two committees and a vote that Musk himself says is a high bar.

If you are converting any dollar gains from foreign shares, our currency converter uses today's rate, and the capital gains tax calculator shows the tax side.

Earlier this week Musk also said he would give one SpaceX share to every US child next year: read that story.