Musk backs Tesla-SpaceX merger but leaves talks to two committees

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that Tesla and SpaceX have each formed special committees of independent directors to explore a potential merger, at shareholders' request. No agreement on transaction terms has been reached.

Speaking on SpaceX's earnings call as the company released its second-ever public earnings report, Musk said he supports the idea. He also said he cannot take part in the committees' discussions because he is a conflicted party.

He put a number on the approval bar: a merger would require the backing of 50% of all Tesla shareholders. And he pushed back on the assumption that a deal is coming. "I think some people out there assume that a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty and I think that would be overstating it," he said.

Musk framed the case for combining the companies around shared technical work — superintelligence software, chip design, the Terafab, robotics and mass-to-orbit. He said a merged company would be worth about $3.5 trillion. Another estimate puts the combined entity at $2.6 trillion.

The timing matters. SpaceX reported its first-ever quarterly profit as a public company the same day Musk backed the merger, according to one outlet. That turns a long-speculated idea into a governance question: two independent committees, a shareholder threshold, and no terms on the table.

The structure is the story as much as the deal. A Tesla-SpaceX combination would concentrate AI, robotics, energy, launch, satellite communications and computing infrastructure under one roof — raising antitrust scrutiny, dilution questions for Tesla shareholders, and governance concerns given Musk's dual role.

Earlier reporting, from January 2026, said SpaceX was exploring a merger with Tesla or xAI ahead of a planned mid-June 2026 IPO, with discussions described as preliminary and no final decisions. A SpaceX-xAI combination was also reported, with SpaceX's acquisition of xAI creating a business valued at $1.25 trillion.

Musk's public support is clear. So is his own description of the process: he is not in the room where it gets decided.