Sure, let’s smoosh SpaceX and Tesla together, who cares

Oh sure, SpaceX’s credit risk is pretty high because it’s about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips , but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger!

The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or “spread the light of consciousness,” as he put it in this week’s SpaceX earnings call (and earlier S-1). Now, a reasonably informed person knows that we don’t have the technology — or, frankly, even the raw information to build the technology — in order to support human life in space. So that means robots. But a lag between Earth and the Moon or Mars makes for difficulty in controlling the robots. So having artificially intelligent robots who can make decisions on their own with minimal supervision from Earth is the next sci-fi logic step.

“There’s a lot to be gained from cooperating on developing superintelligence software.”

If you believe Musk’s story, the technology we are talking about is being developed through self-driving cars (Tesla), LLMs (SpaceX), and humanoid robots (Tesla), all of which require data centers (SpaceX). Conveniently, we have just had earnings for both companies. On the other hand, if you view Mars as a useful fiction Musk uses to explain his antics in public, well, there’s a lot of money and a lot of control Musk gets from the merger.

Musk said on the recent SpaceX earnings call that “there’s a lot of merit to combining” SpaceX and Tesla. Why? “There’s a lot to be gained from cooperating on developing superintelligence software.” But artificial intelligence — ah, excuse me, super intelligence software isn’t the business SpaceX is really in right now. In its Q3 earnings on Tuesday, SpaceX reported $7.56 billion in revenue from the artificial intelligence — sorry, sorry, super intelligence division. The subcategory “SI solutions & infrastructure revenues” — which I think is Grok, Cursor, and the neocloud business wrapped together — jumped to $7 billion, or more than three times what it was last quarter. Now some of this was getting Cursor stapled on , which added $608 million in revenue. Most of the rest of that $7 billion was likely renting out compute to Anthropic and Google; Grok is probably contributing less, says Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson.

At first blush, this may look comparable to the revenue of a company like Anthropic, whose leaked S-1 shows the company had $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year from its frontier models. But SpaceX’s AI business looks more like CoreWeave than Anthropic. While we are told in the press release there was “increased Grok adoption across enterprise customers and consumers,” that number wasn’t broken out from bare-metal revenue. And if Musk wanted to brag about it, he would.