SpaceX and Tesla merger talks advance, with a record deal possible as soon as December

A rocket company and a car company could become one company within weeks. SpaceX and Tesla are making progress in their merger talks and could announce a deal as soon as December, Bloomberg News reported on Nov. 12, citing people familiar with the matter. Together the two are worth roughly $3.4 trillion, which would make this the biggest corporate deal in history by a wide margin.

Some background. Elon Musk runs both companies. In February, SpaceX announced it was acquiring xAI, which had already absorbed the social network X, so today's SpaceX already houses rockets, Starlink satellites, the Grok AI models and X. SpaceX went public in June. On its third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 20, Musk said both boards had set up special committees of independent directors to study a combination. He called a merger a good idea but said he stays out of those talks because, as CEO of both companies, he has a conflict of interest.

The new part is that the conversation has moved from whether to merge to how. According to Bloomberg's sources, the boards and their advisers are hammering out the terms of the deal and the governance of the combined company, including how many SpaceX shares Tesla investors would receive. December is the aggressive target; the companies have also discussed an announcement slipping into early 2027. One complication under discussion, Bloomberg reported, is how to keep Tesla's large business in China separate from SpaceX's US government and defense contracts. Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment.

How big is this? According to Reuters, SpaceX is valued at more than $1.9 trillion and Tesla at about $1.5 trillion. Deals long cited as the largest ever, like Vodafone's takeover of Germany's Mannesmann in 1999-2000, were in the neighborhood of $200 billion. This would be more than ten times that. The combined company would put electric cars, battery storage, Optimus humanoid robots, rockets, Starlink and AI computing under one roof. The two are already deeply tied together: in August SpaceX announced Terafab, a chip factory in Texas it is building with Tesla, and Musk has said its first test chips are expected around May or June 2027. This week, SpaceX also unveiled plans for $74 billion in supercomputing campuses.

The deal is far from done. Musk said on that earnings call that on Tesla's side a merger would need the support of a majority of all outstanding shares, according to Chinese tech outlet QbitAI's account of the call, and regulators would also have to sign off. A JPMorgan analyst wrote last month that SpaceX's defense contracts and Tesla's China operations are the two key factors for regulatory and shareholder approval.

For everyday people, the ones most directly affected are Tesla shareholders, many of them retail investors. If the merger happens, their Tesla shares would most likely be swapped for shares in the new company at a set ratio, and that ratio is exactly what is being negotiated now. For car buyers, nothing about Tesla's cars, prices or service changes overnight. Longer term, Musk wants self-driving, robots, satellite networks and AI computing to work as one system. A single company would make it easier to move people, money and chips between those businesses, but it would also mean trouble in one part could hit the other.

Original sources published: Bloomberg, Nov 13, 2026, 04:22 Beijing time / Nov 12, 2026, 3:22 PM EST; QbitAI, Nov 13, 2026, 14:43 Beijing time / 1:43 AM EST