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Space is hot right now. In the words of a young enthusiast who witnessed the launch of NASA’s Artemis II, “We’re going back to the frickin’ moon!”
Before there were Elon Musk fanboys, there were space fanboys, and by investing in SpaceX, you can own a piece of it. It’s in that spirit that Wall Street is bracing for a blockbuster IPO.
As we wrote in our quarter in review, Musk’s standing in the CEO power rankings is on the rise. That’s mostly to do with SpaceX’s gravitational pull, and by that we mean the gargantuan amounts of money it will raise, and its potential to elevate Musk even further as a government partner, a Wall Street fixture, and a preeminent tech entrepreneur.
The public excitement over NASA’s lunar mission is the perfect appetizer for the expected $75 billion SpaceX IPO. Who doesn’t love rocket launches? People want in on the action. Meanwhile, Tesla sales are down, and government subsidies — exciting for automakers and customers — are gone.
But Musk is in the enviable position of having another business that still claims enormous government support and enough public goodwill that people actually seek out videos of its exploits. Rockets are cool.
Of course, if rockets aren’t your jam, SpaceX’s recent acquisition of xAI and a pivot to putting data centers in space puts the company squarely into the AI trade too.
Could this all amount to a big distraction for Tesla, like DOGE was last year? Maybe, but there’s also a case that rising tides for his “family of companies” is good here, even if SpaceX becomes the favored child.
Especially if SpaceX ends up absorbing Tesla the same way it swallowed Musk’s xAI, and we’ve been hearing chatter to that effect.
“We continue to believe that SpaceX and Tesla will eventually merge into one company in 2027 with the groundwork already in place for both operations to become one organization,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a note last week.
Ives, who did have a problem with Musk’s DOGE side quest, is clearly bullish on what that would mean. Merging his largest companies would unite Musk’s business endeavors while allowing him to concentrate his attention, spread out risk, and make any bets on one a bet on all.
One imagines that the multi-hyphenate CEO will end up managing a lot of the same things either way. But a Musk unitary state, an AI, space, and defense conglomorate, would at least quiet some of the distraction criticism.