A SpaceX-Tesla merger sold as superintelligence mostly strengthens Musk’s control

SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger, and Elon Musk said on SpaceX’s earnings call there is a lot to gain from cooperating on what he calls superintelligence software, The Verge reports. Bloomberg reports a push to announce a deal by the first half of 2027 so it closes under the current administration. It would fold cars, robots, rockets, satellites, data centers and a fast-growing AI compute business into one company. The companies already have ties, including SpaceX’s purchase of $131 million of Cybertrucks and joint projects Terafab, a planned Texas chip fab with Intel loosely involved, and Macrohard, an AI software project announced in March. Tesla reported a second straight quarter of declining profits as it shifts toward robots and robotaxis.

The logic is not crazy. Self-driving, humanoid robots, language models and data centers compete for the same chips and engineers. Columnist Matt Levine’s point, cited by The Verge, is that one person running two AI-hungry companies is a standing conflict of interest, and a merger would at least let resources go where most useful; pairing factories with a data-center buildout could also ease borrowing.

The AI business itself looks different from the pitch. SpaceX’s superintelligence division reported $7.56 billion in Q3 revenue. Cursor, folded in after SpaceX bought it (OpenAI’s Cursor decision), contributed $608 million, and a DA Davidson analyst told The Verge most of the rest was likely compute rented to Anthropic and Google, with Grok contributing less; Grok’s share was not broken out. That resembles a neocloud more than a frontier lab, with heavy capital needs. SpaceX is about to borrow another $40 billion for Nvidia chips, and Fortune estimates the two companies could spend close to $50 billion on capex in Q4 alone.

Musk holds over 50% of the vote at SpaceX through supervoting shares, versus about 20% at Tesla. If SpaceX buys Tesla in a stock deal, he gains control of the combined company in a way he cannot get at Tesla directly, as a law professor told The Verge. Both companies are in Texas, where shareholder lawsuits face steep barriers. A change of control could also trigger a payout under his Tesla pay package if the price reaches $2 trillion or more, plus accelerated vesting.

The joint AI projects that would justify a merger remain thin on paper. SpaceX’s S-1 said Terafab and Macrohard were in very early stages with key terms unsettled, neither appears in the latest quarterly filing, and Musk now says Terafab volume production is due in the second half of 2028. Concentrating this much compute, infrastructure and voting power in one entity, with weak shareholder recourse, deserves scrutiny; a real superintelligence case should survive a hard look at the terms. More in our autonomous vehicle coverage, business coverage and Nvidia coverage.