SpaceX and Tesla Are Joined at the Hip. A Merger Would Make It Formal.

Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.

Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.

The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.

And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.

The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.

The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.

“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.

For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.

Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.

SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.

The SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy v3 Booster lift off from the launch complex in Starbase, Texas, framed by silhouetted plants in the foreground. — A test flight from the SpaceX launch complex in Starbase, Texas. Steve Nesius/Reuters

Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.

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The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.

In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.

The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.

Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.

Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.

It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.

The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.

Tesla Optimus humanoid robots and a Cybercab autonomous vehicle on display. — A Tesla Cybercab autonomous driverless vehicle and Optimus humanoid robots. Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg News

“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”

On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.

Musk at the wheel

For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.

Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.

The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.

As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.

As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.

The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.

If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.

Leaders from five businesses share what running a company has taught them — and why the reality hasn’t always matched their expectations.

Leadership can look very different from the outside. Behind the title are difficult decisions, competing demands and the challenge of knowing when to speak, when to listen and when to change course.

From digital marketing and wearable technology to property, pool care and dental technology, these business leaders share the lessons nobody prepared them for.

Sabri Suby, King Kong

Sabri Suby launched digital marketing agency King Kong in 2014 with $50 and a laptop, working from his home in Byron Bay. A regular on the Australian Financial Review’s Young Rich List, he is also a bestselling author, a former Shark Tank Australia investor and a father of three.

“The biggest misconception about being a CEO is that you won’t have a boss. People think, ‘I want to start my own company so I can be the CEO and be my own boss.’ Little do they know that you start working for 10, 20, sometimes hundreds of bosses. Nothing is more important than delivering for your client, and you’re held accountable to them every single day.

“With my team members, I never refer to them as employees. They don’t work for me; they work with me. The whole idea of the CEO as the big boss at the top is completely false.

“Company building is one of the most creative endeavours there is. If you’re a builder, and you love building systems, teams, products and services — all the things I love to do — then it’s the ultimate canvas.

“Great leaders think of their company as a living organism. You have to do what’s best for the whole organisation. That means making the hard, unpopular decisions. As a leader, you have to zoom out and optimise for the overall health of the organisation, and then sometimes carry the weight of being misunderstood while you do it.

“The lid on any organisation is the founder’s ability to think big. You can point to countless businesses in the smallest, boring niches that became enormous, billion-dollar companies purely because the founder was able to conceive it before they could achieve it.

“Early in my career, I had a bad case of shiny object syndrome. I was under the false belief that the more opportunities I pursued and said yes to, the more I’d increase my surface area of luck. It’s actually the opposite. Focus is what increases your luck: your ability to concentrate on the few things that really matter and say no to everything else.”

Nicky Zhu, Dymesty

Growing up, Nicky Zhu wanted to be an archaeologist. Instead, her career in wearable AI has involved digging through layers of technological complexity. At smart-glasses company Dymesty, she has learned that leadership requires conviction, honest feedback and the courage to be challenged.

“Nobody tells you that leadership at a startup means making decisions with conviction while privately questioning every single one of them. The hardest part of leadership isn’t the technology, the fundraising or the competition. It’s the loneliness of being the person who has to project certainty when certainty doesn’t exist.

“Your team doesn’t need you to be right. They need you to be decisive. I’ve made calls that turned out wrong — killing a product feature three weeks before launch, restructuring our supply chain partnership mid-production — and the team recovered. What they couldn’t recover from was the quarter I hesitated.

“I delayed a critical hiring decision for six weeks because I wasn’t sure we could afford the role. That hesitation cost us a product development cycle and sent a signal to the team that I didn’t trust our own trajectory. The damage from indecision was worse than any bad decision I’ve made.

“As CEO, you will often be the last person to hear the truth. The day you take on that role, the quality of honest feedback you receive drops by half. People filter. They soften. They tell you what’s working and route around what isn’t.

“I learned to build what I call ‘truth channels’ — one-on-one check-ins where I explicitly ask each team member to tell me one thing that’s broken and one thing I’m wrong about. The first two months, I got polite deflections. By month four, I was getting the kind of direct feedback that saved us from shipping a product with a critical UX flaw nobody had escalated.

“Your job isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to make the room safe enough for the smartest person to speak up. I’ve watched technically brilliant engineers sit silent in meetings because the culture rewarded agreement over dissent.

“The moment I started publicly rewarding the person who challenged my thinking — not just tolerating it, but thanking them in front of the team — the quality of our product decisions improved measurably.

“Leadership isn’t a skill you develop and then possess. It’s a practice you repeat daily while constantly discovering new ways you’re getting it wrong. I genuinely love that there’s no finish line. It keeps the work alive.”

Nic Brill, Poolwerx

Nic Brill began competitive swimming at six in his home country of South Africa. Perhaps fittingly, his career eventually led him to Poolwerx, the pool and spa maintenance business founded in Queensland. He became its Australia and New Zealand CEO in 2022 and global CEO in October 2025.

“My background in swimming meant I learned early on that while individual discipline and pushing beyond your limits are essential, you cannot achieve sustainable global scale alone. One of the toughest lessons I’ve learned in business is that you can have the most brilliant strategy in the world, but if you don’t cultivate the right culture and build a capable, resilient team around you, execution will falter.

“Resilience isn’t just about enduring tough times — such as navigating pandemics or economic downturns — it’s about having the humility to listen to your network and the agility to pivot when necessary.

“People often assume a CEO has all the answers and makes every important decision. The reality is very different. My role isn’t to have all the answers. Leadership is about listening, learning and continually adapting, not having all the answers from day one.

“As a leader, particularly within a franchise model, my job is to clear the path for others to succeed. At Poolwerx, our number one KPI is franchisee profitability. The biggest misconception is that the CEO is at the centre of the business, when in truth, our franchise partners and clients are at the centre.

“I’ve never felt that people work for me — people work with me. And because they work with me, that doesn’t mean that I’m ultimately the person who makes the call. I genuinely want to hear their views because I do believe that if we’re in it together, everyone’s combined input will make for a better outcome.

“What I love most about what I do is the impact we get to have on people’s lives. On one hand, I get to see our franchise partners build thriving businesses, and on the other, we help families everywhere safely enjoy their backyards and create lifelong poolside memories together.

“Understanding your purpose in life — not just work — and genuinely knowing you’re not the star of the show are things I try to value every day.”

Nat Gordon, Propoholic

Nat Gordon co-founded her first real estate agency at 21 and owned and operated a boutique Sydney agency for two decades. Today, as founder and CEO of independent property advocacy business Propoholic, she guides clients through buying, selling and renovating.

“I’ve owned real estate and construction businesses for 30 years, and I still make decisions every day without knowing how people will respond. In property, nothing is guaranteed, so you consider everything you know, trust your instinct and make the best decision you can.

“The hardest part of leading people is that no two people are wired the same way, so your approach is constantly changing. Every person — whether a team member or a client — is going through something different, even if the situation on paper looks the same. Listening well and genuinely caring change the quality of every conversation and always improve the outcome.

“The ideas that come to me in the peace of the night are often far better than those from the noise of the day. Our clients are trusting us with their biggest financial asset, and I don’t take that lightly. If lying awake thinking through another scenario helps them achieve a better outcome, I don’t see that as a bad thing.

“One lesson I’ve learned is that you won’t make everyone happy, and trying to do so will make you unhappy. Early on, I wanted every client to leave the conversation happy. Now I understand the right advice is sometimes advice nobody wants to hear.

“I think good leaders don’t pretend to know everything. It’s OK to admit that you aren’t sure about something, and people respect you more for acknowledging that. You have to seek answers and be willing to learn, often from the smart people you surround yourself with.”

Alexis and Luke Withers, Aalto

Husband-and-wife team Alexis and Luke Withers are co-CEOs of Australian dental technology company Aalto, whose clear aligners are manufactured in Sydney. They set out to make orthodontic treatment simpler and more accessible — and along the way discovered what it takes to lead a business together.

Alexis: “Nobody ever told me that leadership often means walking away from things that are working. One of the biggest decisions we made as founders was to step away from a successful business model despite achieving 312% revenue growth between 2020 and 2025.

“On paper, it made very little sense. But after thousands of patient interactions, we could see where customer expectations and the industry were heading. Leadership isn’t just protecting what you’ve built; sometimes it’s having the conviction to disrupt yourself before somebody else does.

“Another thing no one tells you is that being right matters less than listening. Some of our biggest strategic decisions came directly from customer feedback. Founders can become attached to their original vision, but customers often spot changes in the market before you do. Leadership is having the humility to listen when the evidence tells you your assumptions are wrong.”

Luke: “The traditional sole-CEO structure dominates the corporate landscape, so there weren’t many places to look for examples. What I have come to realise is that your co-founder should challenge you, not validate you.

“On paper, we probably shouldn’t work as founders. Alexis is analytical, methodical and naturally risk-aware. I am instinctive, ambitious and like to move quickly. We rarely approach problems the same way, but over time we’ve realised that tension is one of our biggest strengths. The best decisions usually happen somewhere in the middle of our opposing viewpoints.

“And nobody tells you that running a company with your spouse means there is no off switch! People love the idea of building a business with their partner, but nobody talks about the fact that board meetings happen over dinner and strategy conversations happen on holidays.

“We’ve had to become very intentional about separating founder time from husband-and-wife time, which we still struggle with to the detriment of our friends and family!”