te valuations, require heavier disclosure, and likely spark shareholder scrutiny. The bigger question isn’t antitrust – the businesses overlap only loosely – it’s whether any deal can be priced in a way that looks fair to public-market investors.
Why should I care?
For markets: Valuations can make or break the story.
Tesla already trades on big autonomy expectations, so any plan that uses its shares or cash to buy a private asset risks backlash if investors think the price is inflated. A SpaceX IPO would create a clearer market-based valuation, making future Musk-ecosystem deals easier to benchmark and harder to dismiss as “insider pricing.”
Zooming out: Compute is pushing companies to redraw the map.
AI’s bottleneck is increasingly infrastructure – chips, power, data, and connectivity – not just software. That’s why firms are looking beyond traditional mergers into cross-industry combinations that secure inputs for training and deployment. Even if SpaceX never merges with Tesla, the trend is clear: access to compute is becoming a strategic moat, and corporate structure is turning into another lever to get it.