HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX are drifting into the same orbit, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles this week that the deepening collaboration between his two flagship companies makes the question of a merger worth asking.
Asked directly why the two remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk left the door wide open. "With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there's so much close collaboration in so many areas," he said. It was a striking shift from his past flat denials, and it landed with SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell seated beside him, describing an integration that is already well underway. The remarks helped fuel the merger optimism we tracked in our look at why $TSLA has been climbing on deal talk.
Shotwell says integration is running ahead of schedule
Shotwell told the audience that SpaceX engineers and executives have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, and that the businesses are coming together "faster than I thought," even if they are "not fully integrated yet." That candor matters: it is one thing for analysts to sketch a merger on a whiteboard, and another for the president of SpaceX to say the plumbing is already being connected.
The two companies are jointly building Terafab, a chip complex in Austin meant to serve both Tesla's in-house AI computing needs and SpaceX's satellite ambitions. Tesla also holds a small stake in SpaceX, under one percent, that traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI startup.
