Tesla-SpaceX Merger Being Considered (bbc.com) 135
Elon Musk says a merger between Tesla and SpaceX is under active consideration, with special committees at both companies evaluating a deal that could combine businesses valued at roughly $3.5 trillion. "Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said during a call with financial analysts over the quarterly business results of SpaceX on Tuesday. The BBC reports: While Musk noted the certainty of such a merger should not be assumed, and it would need shareholders' support, he said special committees within both companies have been formed to examine the move. "The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there's no guarantee that they will," Musk added. "But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained."
[...] The company, which builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites, is now expanding into offering cloud compute capacity for other tech companies, like Anthropic and Google. That line of business has become the most profitable part of SpaceX, bringing in $7.5bn according to the latest quarterly results (PDF). Starlink also tallied revenue of $5.2bn. SpaceX as a whole, however, is not profitable and has lost $1.1bn so far this year.
[...] Musk said on Tuesday a full merger between the two companies would make sense for the work each is doing around chips, artificial intelligence, software and more. He described himself as a "conflicted party" as the chief executive of Tesla and of SpaceX. Even commenting on the possibility of a merger between the two companies, Musk compared to "tap dancing through a minefield." He added a merger would ultimately be decided by shareholders. At least 50% of Tesla's shareholders would need to approve the merger, which Musk described as "quite a high hurdle to achieve."
[...] The company, which builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites, is now expanding into offering cloud compute capacity for other tech companies, like Anthropic and Google. That line of business has become the most profitable part of SpaceX, bringing in $7.5bn according to the latest quarterly results (PDF). Starlink also tallied revenue of $5.2bn. SpaceX as a whole, however, is not profitable and has lost $1.1bn so far this year.
[...] Musk said on Tuesday a full merger between the two companies would make sense for the work each is doing around chips, artificial intelligence, software and more. He described himself as a "conflicted party" as the chief executive of Tesla and of SpaceX. Even commenting on the possibility of a merger between the two companies, Musk compared to "tap dancing through a minefield." He added a merger would ultimately be decided by shareholders. At least 50% of Tesla's shareholders would need to approve the merger, which Musk described as "quite a high hurdle to achieve."
"Fun" fact (Score:5, Informative)
Because SpaceX acquiring Tesla would count as "a change in control", and in a change of control, the operational goals of Musk's stock compensation package (which he just passed, knowing that the acquisition was possible) - things like 20 million vehicles, 1 million Optimus robots, or 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation - get dropped. [electrek.co] Only the $TSLA market cap requirement - just over $500/share - is required for him to get his first tranche. And he can basically force whatever offer he wants to be made for $TSLA to ensure he gets it.
Re: "Fun" fact (Score:2)
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The only truly unique thing associated with Musk is Starship. That piece of tech is important for our species and everyone else is a solid 20 years behind
Wait, "some other company" can replace Falcon in "a few years" but everyone is "20 years behind" a design that has only been under active development since late 2018? Your math ain't mathing, dude.
Re: "Fun" fact (Score:2)
Re: "Fun" fact (Score:5, Interesting)
Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.
The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:
Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.
(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )
There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.
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The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.
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The only truly unique thing associated with Musk is Starship. That piece of tech is important for our species and everyone else is a solid 20 years behind.
"Important for our species" ... how? Trust me, our species ain't going anywhere. There's nowhere to go.
Re: "Fun" fact (Score:2)
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The only truly unique thing associated with Musk is Starship. That piece of tech is important for our species and everyone else is a solid 20 years behind.
It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonist
Re: "Fun" fact (Score:2)
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I agree which is why it's so frustrating that Musk, for all his power and wealth has decided to make the problems on Earth worse by almost every metric.
The things that that carry the greatest global risk are environmental collapse and political unrest and war, all things that are worse for his influence (and yes that includes Tesla kick-starting the EV industry which is kinda crazy). Whatever good for humanity Starship would bring is offset 50x negatively by his rotten politics, paper thin skin and conspir
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They're not, they're great and that's the upside. We all love the upside, if it was all upside life would be quite different.
Downsides we get are the weirdo fascist tendencies, the maxing out of the worst aspects of social media, the haphazard dismantling of USAID for no real reason other than "vibes". The continued support for all of the last 2 years of politicking, the war, corruption, graft, and crimes are part of his doing. I hope to god we can dig through what actually happened with DOGE and I bet th
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You eat pieces of shit for breakfast.
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Keep things you're comparing on the same scale. Say you give 100 years to getting off this planet. Then China has both the resources and 100 years to get us there. And unlike Elon's company, they will be around in 100 years to see it through.Elon has 10 years headstart, that's a blip over 100 yea
Re: "Fun" fact (Score:2)
We could use starship to mail it a bunch of nukes though
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of note: Tesla is pushing thru an "auto vote" measure in the December 3 2026 meeting. This means that all individual investors shares will be automatically counted as agreeing with the however board majority votes, unless an investor actively changes their vote on a particular issue.
Getting 50%+ approval to merge will be easy after this passes. Anyone who doesn't actively disagree automatically approved!
Re:"Fun" fact (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternatively, some people in that subreddit can't stand that anyone could express valid concerns about Tesla and decides that it must be some irrational, inexplicable blind anti-Tesla rather than informed and real concerns.
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Apply:
sed 's/Tesla/TOPIC/g`
to your comment, and you have described 95% of Reddit.
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As much as it can apply to online communities in general including slashdot, Reddit and reddit-likes *really* take the cake for creating circle-jerk communities. Creating niche communities with moderators that ban at any comment they didn't want to see. Saw a reply to one of my comments that I thought to be a bit dumb (basically, that we should replace TLS certificates with blockchain), but not horribly unforgiveable or anything, and the comment got removed and the user banned from the community. Mod saw
Re:"Fun" fact (Score:5, Interesting)
Who is reliable? Electrek provide sources for all their articles linked in the article. In all their articles they separate fact from analysis under a section "Electrek's Take". On the flip side Tesla fanboys range from the rabid mouth frothing nutjobs, to people with very real money on the line (not shills, but rather investors) who have a lot to gain by posting pro-tesla bullshit.
Yeah one of those is not as reliable as the other.
Rather than criticising Electrek by posting a link to a reddit post that doesn't even know how to spell the site's name, how about you read the linked article and bring to the table what it is that you disagree with, and where they were wrong. Right here, do it here, evil Electrek can't silence you here and we would value you bringing some actual material information to the table rather than your ad hominem bullshit.
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They cite their sources and separate their opinion, that's the definition of reliable. I didn't say they weren't biased, I said you're stupid for engaging in an ad hominem attack rather than addressing the materials (ignore Electrek, go to their cited sources and address those if you want) of the discussion.
Look maybe I will hate you. Maybe that hate will result in me systematically looking through everything you say and calling out each individual stupid thing you say. That may be my future mission, and my
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Re: "Fun" fact (Score:2)
Nothing, since Hitler shot himself.
Fingers crossed...
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You are fucking sick in the head. Seriously. So much anger.
Elon's attack on our government has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people so far and the number is expected to reach into the millions. He's a mass murderer on an epic scale. You're a sick piece of shit for celebrating that, and fuck you and all the other Nazis. I hope you all shoot yourselves in the head in bunkers.
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Synergy (Score:5, Funny)
The proposed company would build cars and rockets, operate cabs, build and maintain data centers, offer AI subscriptions, internet subscriptions, sell batteries, and operate a social media platform. Such synergy must bring amazing opportunities for cost reductions all across the company.
Re:Synergy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what's so absurd about it all. In general, the market has trended toward splitting up conglomerates. If you're GE and you make both jet engines and electrical equipment, the people who want to invest in jet engines would rather a pure jet engine play, and the people who want to invest in electrical equipment would rather a pure electrical equipment play.
This is all about one person's wants and needs, and that person is Elon Musk.
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The
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The Japanese conglomerate model works because the brand itself is essentially a holding company for the sub-companies that are largely independently operated.
There's not a lot of crossover between electric razors, televisions, microwave ovens, and avionics; yet Panasonic does all of those today from the humble beginnings of a guy with a basement who made a battery powered lamp that you can bolt to your bicycle in early 20th century Japan
Those companies hardly ever talk to each other except at a company spon
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That is a little bit misleading.
Plenty of those "conglomerates" are in fact a bunch of separated companies, that share only a name part, like Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi does not even have a holding / mother company.
Mitsubishi is split into 3 "Great Houses" and 7 smaller companies, wearing the name Mitsubishi, and another bunch not having Mitsubishi as part of their name.
The other 5 Keiretsu have similar structures.
However, your point is that different cultures see a solid base in commerce very different than Am
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Re:Synergy (Score:4, Interesting)
Also Jack Welch saw that there was more money to be made operating a credit firm so just ditch the legacy of the company. I know things are more complex than just lay at the hands of one man but one guy can do quite a lot of damage, not just to a company but society at large.
Part One: Jack Welch Is Why You Got Laid Off [youtube.com]
Re:Synergy (Score:5, Interesting)
Did SpaceX build rockets to fuel Starlink, or did Starlink fuel the need for cheap launch vehicles?
This is the classic chicken egg problem.
IMHO SpaceX was building Rockets and when they finally got it working and relaunching boosters, it needed something to put on them. A bunch of satellites in LEO creating a super network of communications was obvious. Now they have launched everything those rockets could ever launch, it needs the next big thing AI in Space (Outside geo-political lines) makes sense. Who's laws does SpaceX XAI have to obey once in space?
Re:Synergy (Score:5, Funny)
The laws of thermodynamics.
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It's more like guidelines.
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Agree... The world was apparently not waiting around for cheap rockets to start some kind of "Space Age 2.0". Sure, cheaper launches are great, but maintaining the manufacturing base to build rockets is hard. When said rockets are re-usable, at some point you have all this manufacturing capacity sitting around with nothing to do but build a few spare parts. You would need to have demand so high that the rocket replacement rate was enough to keep your manufacturing at a break-even point. Starlink was SpaceX'
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This is not a chicken and egg problem. It's an analysis problem. SpaceX built rockets for reasons started by government incentives and prizes to get new rockets designed. Once their rockets were designed customers also came flooding in. They'd be doing perfectly fine without Starlink. Starlink came almost a decade after SpaceX's first launch and the first Starlink constellation went up 2 years after SpaceX was already handling commercial and government contracts using second hand (reused) boosters.
Starlink
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Who's laws does SpaceX XAI have to obey once in space?
American laws, assuming Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty [unoosa.org] remains in force.
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Did SpaceX build rockets to fuel Starlink, or did Starlink fuel the need for cheap launch vehicles?
Someone saw the ability to launch stuff into space more cheaply so a rocket company was born. This enabled the satellite thing because why not send up useful payloads while validating? Not chicken and egg I think.
Re:Synergy (Score:4, Informative)
The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.
It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.
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Overwhelmingly your shareholders are becoming just index funds. In that play only market cap matters.
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"This is all about one person's wants and needs, and that person is Elon Musk"
he holds 80% of the Class B voting shares of SpaceX so his wishes, wants & needs are effectively law
"by your command, Imperious Leader"
Re:Synergy (Score:4, Insightful)
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This isn't a new pattern for him.
Remember that he used the Tesla cash cow to bail out SolarCity. Now he's doing the same thing for SpaceX after the IPO, so he can run away with a swimming pool full of other people's money.
Siemens (Score:3)
Re: Siemens (Score:2)
Fuji heavy industries one crazy...
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Okay, sort of a form of a plan for the joke I was looking for... "Synergy" was inevitable, but I was looking for a "Where's the value?" version, perhaps patterned after the ancient "Where's the beef?" commercial.
I don't think there is any real value left in today's stock market, though it has innovated in new forms of Ponzi schemes. Rather than going outwards looking for fresh suckers to bring in more cash, the way traditional Ponzi schemes worked, the stock market is now going inwards with fresh imaginary
Re: Synergy (Score:3)
Re: Synergy (Score:2)
Miss the sarcasm (Score:2)
about the Synergy post?
No, not me!
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if you look at his track record with DOGE, then you can see his diktats can easily go awry. He walked away from the Fed. Gov. after he screwed it up, he won't be able to walk away from GonzoWhopper Elmo, Inc.
Screwing up the federal government, which was conducting multiple investigations into his companies and himself personally, was exactly his goal. He destroyed the agencies that were trying to regulate him, and investigate him. Being able to steal everyone's data was just a nice side effect to him. Being able to kill funding that was helping to keep hundreds of thousands of African children alive was his way of giving a giant FU to them.
We saw this with Enron (Score:3, Interesting)
If this happens ... this is Enron 2.0
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If this happens ... this is Enron 2.0
That's not how that worked at all.
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Whatever the motive is it certainly won't benefit anyone besides the tres comas club and the suits.
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There is 10 trillion dollars just sitting there waiting for the Epstein class to take it and they will be damned if they're going to let you keep that money. The same goals that bankrupted all the companies you grew up with using private equity and leveraged buyouts are now comin
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Because his video is well sourced (Score:2)
You can only live in your alternate reality for so long. If you're over 65 you will probably die before the damage hits you personally but otherwise you should probably join us in the real world before it's too late.
Re:We saw this with Enron (Score:5, Interesting)
It already is. SpaceX is Musk's personal bailout company. There's a reason he turned X into an AI company that created computers purchased by Tesla computers to pump up its value to the magic number that Musk paid for Twitter only to sell his private holdings of xAI to SpaceX. It was a bailout package.
There's a reason SpaceX bought a huge fleet of Cybertrucks. It was a bailout package.
SpaceX is a way of providing circular finance to compensate for Musk's idiocy and keep the rich, rich off the back of your tax dollars, which happens to be SpaceX's primary income.
Slightly off topic: x.com bank (Score:2)
I thought that would be an obvious outlet for his megalomania.
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Watch the P/E (Score:2)
Re: Watch the P/E (Score:4, Insightful)
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Government approval should be easy (Score:2)
Since under Unitary Executive Theory, government agencies answer to the President and not to any mandate that Congress gave them when their agency was created.
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They will make some claims about national security and executive orders will be issued.
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Maybe ready some of the essays by the Heritage Foundation and others over the last few decades before commenting. You don't have to go through the whole thing, but most of them are only a few pages long.
One aspect is that UET asserts that the President can dismiss subordinate officials, even when the statutes creating their offices permit removal only "for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Which I think is what you are specifically referring to.
More broadly, UET argues that the head
It makes a lot of sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Tesla really has done no product refreshes and their stock price is based mostly on promises of rocket cars and robots that replace all jobs. Its P/E is off the charts and in reality they sell 2 cars and a pixelated box. Musk needs to keep the price high to leverage it for the loans that fund his lifestyle.
SpaceX has modern working products and gets funded by government contracts as well as private space launches. They sell internet and AI models. They are only not making money becuase of R&D. So they can take the Tesla speculation bubble and rocket ship that stock price while at the same time having less risk due to having real products. It doesn't matter if spaceX fails to deliver a rocket car because they deliver actual rockets to space for their customers.
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Tesla really has done no product refreshes
What are you talking about, they refreshed the Model Y this year. Have you not seen those god awful fuck-ugly things driving down the road? The ones that look like a cheap alien robot from The Day The World Stood Still? And they refreshed the Model 3 in 2024, and it got a new interior this year.
Tesla has done product refreshes. But I understand why you think they haven't, for the same reason I think there's only one Matrix movie.
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Fair. I guess they are updating them, they are just not marketing them. I know all about changes to other car brands, but that's about it. Perhaps Tesla's target market isn't people who like luxury cars and electric vehicles.
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That for sure. Tesla's marketing team seems to be Musk's twitter feed and that's too busy being a far right asshat than actually promote his cars. Whoope de do his car can jump. That's irrelevant, what is irrelevant is cars in my price category, and the reality is I legit wouldn't have known about the model Y refresh if I didn't see one driving down the road, and the Model 3 if my friend didn't recently buy one.
Tesla barely has any marketing of their vehicles compared to other cars.
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SpaceX needs Tesla's revenue to subsidize its AI efforts.
Tesla needs SpaceX for all the AI resources that were diverted from Tesla to SpaceX.
Elon Musk needs the merger in order to circumvent the performance goals in his compensation package.
Said it at the spcx IPO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course its going to happen. All he has to do is cry to daddy Trump.
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Or, I guess the price of pardons will be going up daily.
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To be clear, he was sued by a single investor, Greg Varallo. Greg owned a whopping 9 shares of TSLA. Greg is also a prominent Corporate Lawyer.
Musk's compensation package required Tesla to grow to an unprecedented size for him to receive the compensation. Musk recieved NO salary - he would only be compensated as Tesla grew by reaching these various milestones. When the compensation package was first announced, all
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I'm worried that this is going to have a negative effect on TSLA shareholders.
The market giveth, and the market taketh.
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"Musk recieved NO salary"
Tesla was based in CA at the time. CEOs there are required to be paid a salary.
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then that's on him and makes the whole "but, but, but, poor Elon hasn't been PAID" utter bullshit.
plenty of CA CEOs get paid big bucks AND have options.
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There is zero investor input at spacex. zip, nada.
Yeah if they had input they may have questioned whether it was worth using SpaceX funds to bail him out of his $44bn Twitter acquisition by funding xAI which bought X.
Normal (Score:2)
Since Tesla cars are now flying around with rockets...
Re: Normal (Score:2)
False.
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That too.
So... (Score:2)
...what product comes next ?!? Electric rockets traveling in the space, or flame-throwing cars on highways ?!?
The real purpose (Score:2)
Is to allow Leon another $45B payout for 'corporate acquisition' or some such incentive.
"Special committees?" (Score:2)
Consisting entirely of Musk employees?
Keep an eye on ... (Score:4, Insightful)
One reveue rich division will prop up a couple of hopeless ventures. Shareholders will be none the wiser.
Another Bad-For-America Move (Score:3)
In studying American manufacturing, when we had it, those who filled a need with government and military supply were give special breaks that their American competitors were not, and that advantage stifled competition and created laziness and complacency in American companies--which in turn, left us open for the onslaught of foreign manufacturing, first from Japan, and then from China. If it weren't for the tilted playing field, perhaps we would have more manufacturing here.
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SpaceX only enjoys near monopoly because NASA can't find its ass with a specialized rover.
In other news ... (Score:4, Interesting)
damn (Score:2)
As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.
We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.
Re: The name of the combined company (Score:2)
Sextla