(May 28): A post-initial public offering (IPO) merger between SpaceX and Tesla Inc is inevitable and only a question of timing, because Elon Musk will want to consolidate control across his companies, according to early SpaceX investor Peter Diamandis.
The combination makes sense because it would give Musk the super voting rights he has at Space Exploration Technologies Corp — where he had 85.1% control before the filing for an IPO — but lacks at publicly held Tesla, Diamandis said on Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview.
“I put it not as a matter of if but only a matter of when those companies come together,” said Diamandis, a founder of the XPrize Foundation and a podcast host who has spoken with Musk this year. Musk and representatives for SpaceX and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
A combined entity would unite Tesla’s ground-based vehicle fleet with SpaceX’s space infrastructure, including the Starship programme. Musk’s super voting rights at SpaceX give him significantly more control than his stake at Tesla, where he has faced shareholder challenges over governance and compensation. SpaceX is headed for an IPO in June, likely the biggest ever.
Merging the companies would give Musk “the ability to operate across all of this infrastructure”, including a fleet of Cybercab robotaxis and Tesla vehicles with compute and power capability, creating “a global infrastructure on the ground and in space”, Diamandis said.
Musk held talks about such a transaction prior to SpaceX’s combination with xAI, Bloomberg reported in January, with Diamandis also speaking to him about it broadly in both January and March.
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Diamandis first invested in SpaceX in the late 2000s, and has started or backed several companies. He founded the XPrize Foundation in the early 1990s, setting a challenge and US$10 million ($12.8 million) reward for teams to try to send a reusable crewed craft to space twice in two weeks.
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