SpaceX is on the verge of a giant IPO (initial public offering). Once upon a time, Elon Musk said that he never wanted to take a company public again, because he didn’t like the public oversight and annoying questions from analysts every quarter. But I guess Musk doesn’t really run SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell does. However, with so much shuffling and merging of Musk’s companies, there is some speculation that could change a lot. As we all know, Musk bought Twitter a few years ago. Later, he launched an AI company xAI. Then Twitter (rebranded as X) and xAI merged. And then, more recently, SpaceX swallowed up xAI, including X. Confused yet? There’s a lot of speculation that all of the merging is basically about bailing out companies that are struggling financially. It’s happened before with Tesla swallowing SolarCity and bailing out Musk’s cousins, who had cofounded the company and worked as CEO and CTO, with Musk as Chairman. But could Tesla and SpaceX really merge? And what would be the point? Well, the two companies have now been linked for a “Terafab” project. “This project includes two advanced chip factories,” TipRanks summarizes. One is focused on Tesla’s AI needs for vehicles and Optimus robots The other is for space-based data centers Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives sees this as an initial partnership that will lead to eventual merging. Now, Ives has definitely drunk the Musk Kool-Aid lately. He has a $600 price target on the Tesla stock, which currently sits under $382. But it would be a very Musky thing to have his two biggest companies converging on a common focus centered around his obsession at the time. He is certainly obsessed with the AI craze these days, and the more he has these companies trying to deliver on elements of it, the more he could justify them merging. It still feels like a far fetched idea. Tesla is mostly about building cars. SpaceX is mostly about sending rockets into space. But if they both become more and more about data centers, chips, and AI, will Musk try to have them merge?
