Indonesia Impact Alliance Aims to Draw Private Capital for Good

The Ford Foundation, alongside government organisations and the business community, launched the Indonesia Impact Alliance in Jakarta on Wednesday to attract more private capital into ventures that solve social and economic problems while earning market returns.

The alliance is being forged at a time when Indonesia is thriving in many ways. In 2021, the Southeast Asian nation regained status lost during the pandemic as an upper-middle-income country, according to the World Bank.

Yet, Indonesia, the fourth-most-populous nation in the world, is home to many people who remain in poverty without sufficient access to education and health services. While abundant in natural resources, the country has also suffered environmental degradation from exploitation of its rainforests for palm oil—a practice that is subsiding from a combination of government and nonprofit efforts.

As the economy continues to grow, the government alongside the United Nations Development Programme Indonesia, Ford, and others, want to ensure society and the environment are taken into account. The alliance aims to boost direct investment into “early-stage, high-impact companies” through increasing investment from investors within the country and abroad, and from the Indonesian diaspora, according to a news release.

“The alliance is about creating a kind of a centre of gravity for diverse stakeholders in Indonesia that all have a shared interest in marshalling more private capital in the service of just and sustainable development,” says Margot Brandenburg, head of impact investments for Ford’s US$1 billion mission investments program.

Chairing the alliance is Romy Cahyadi, CEO of Instellar, an Indonesia company that supports social enterprises through incubation, advisory, and investment.

Members of the alliance are “entrepreneurs, companies that are delivering these impacts, the funds and intermediaries that place capital in those companies, and asset owners,” Brandenburg says. “It also importantly needs to include the government, which can create, and we believe should create, an enabling environment for this type of investment and that can compliment private capital and do things that the private sector can’t do.”

The alliance also includes technical assistance providers of nongovernmental organisations in addition to global and regional economic development institutions. Temasek, the sovereign wealth fund of the nearby nation of Singapore, is also taking part. It needs to be all of those actors, she says, and “we need them all rowing in the same direction.”

Indonesia receives significant impact investing support from a third of those who invest for impact globally, according to a 2018 report from the Global Impact Investing Network. At the time of the report, private institutions had invested nearly US$149 million in 58 transactions, while development finance institutions had invested US$3.6 billion in 67 deals. Many of these investments are still at an early stage, according to Ford.

The alliance is being formed now as a “call to action,” for various governmental bodies, NGOs, and private actors to work together, Brandenburg says. “The sense is that there’s a diverse group of stakeholders working not always in coordination.”

Given the size of the country and its economy, there are people “working across sectors and geographies that may not be in relationship with one another

or may not have connected the dots,” she says. “That’s the role that government policy and regulation play in creating a favourable investment environment

and vice versa.”

The ultimate goal, Brandenburg says, “is to make sure that the whole is at least as great as the sum of the parts, so that people can build off of one another

and not inadvertently duplicate efforts.”

The alliance is affiliated with the Global Steering Group on impact investments, which has national associations in a number of countries, including the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance. Being part of this group gives the new Indonesia alliance access to resources, models, and policy blueprints that have succeeded elsewhere.

A question for Indonesia will be how to take advantage of natural resources that produce cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla, in addition to palm oil, natural rubber, cassava, and coconut oil, while not exploiting workers and local communities or harming the environment.

“Biodiversity is a major asset, but of course with that, [there’s] palm oil and logging and the potential for extractive industries,” Brandenburg says. “The question for impact investors is what does a better model look like that allows a country to prosper on the basis of its natural resources and allows its communities to prosper as well.”

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.

Blurred lines

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.