Update, 20 October: On the call, Elon Musk said Tesla and SpaceX special committees are discussing a possible merger, with no terms agreed, and called it “a good idea,” The Verge reported. Our follow-up has the details.
“When will SpaceX merge with Tesla?” was the second-most upvoted question, drawing 26 upvotes, among those investors submitted to SpaceX management ahead of its third-quarter earnings webcast on 20 October 2026, Reuters reported. The same question received 128 upvotes on the Tesla investor relations site, according to the Reuters report.
Barclays suggested last week that a deal could be announced before Tesla’s annual meeting, with SpaceX the likelier acquirer, Reuters said, though neither company nor Elon Musk has officially committed to favoring a deal. SpaceX reported its quarterly results the same afternoon.
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The key insight: As we read it, investors ranked a Tesla merger question second and a Starship question first, while institutional investors and analysts pressed on AI revenue and spending, at a company whose compute contracts can be terminated on about 90 days’ notice, per Reuters.
The top-voted question, with 38 upvotes, was on the progress of Starship’s lunar lander hardware, Reuters reported, in a list that showed retail investors focused on Starship while analysts and institutional shareholders pressed for detail on AI revenue and spending.
One institutional investor asked how much contracted Google capacity would stay available if a court halted gas turbines at the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, according to the report. Another asked whether Google had accepted the full capacity under its cloud agreement and whether SpaceX expected to earn the full contractual monthly rate.
A prospective investor asked what share of AI revenue is now under multi-year commitments, a question that earned no upvotes. Reuters reported that SpaceX’s AI revenue comes from a handful of customers, including Alphabet’s Google and AI lab Anthropic, and that the compute contracts can be terminated on about 90 days’ notice. It was not clear which questions executives would take, Reuters said.
Upvotes on questions investors submitted to SpaceX management before its third-quarter 2026 webcast, as reported by Reuters on 20 October 2026: 38 for the top question, on Starship’s lunar lander, and 26 for “When will SpaceX merge with Tesla?” The same merger question received 128 upvotes on Tesla’s investor relations site. A question on the share of AI revenue under multi-year commitments earned no upvotes.
Why the Merger Question Keeps Coming Back
Musk’s companies have had business and financial relations for years, even sharing personnel and some board members, CNBC reported in its earnings live blog. Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI, which later converted into shares of SpaceX, and the AI unit of SpaceX spent about $430 million last year on Tesla’s Megapacks and $143 million on Cybertrucks, according to CNBC.
SpaceX and xAI merged in February, and the AI division acquired Cursor in a $60 billion transaction, CNBC reported. SpaceX chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC ahead of the June IPO that a merger “might make Elon’s life a little easier.”
Connecting the Coverage
The questions arrived hours before the results we covered in our SpaceX third-quarter piece: revenue of $14.6 billion, up 161%, with the SI segment bringing in $7.56 billion, according to the company’s release. The question about Google’s capacity ties to the Colossus II buildout that release describes.
The 90-day notice Reuters describes echoes our piece on Reflection’s SpaceX compute deal, which reported CNBC’s account that either side could exit that contract on 90 days’ notice after three months. And our pre-results piece this morning set out Bloomberg Government’s count of $5.9 billion in defense obligations to SpaceX so far in fiscal 2026.
The Structural Read
As we read it, the merger question is a measure of shareholder interest, not of a plan: it drew 26 upvotes on SpaceX’s list and 128 on Tesla’s, Reuters reported, while neither company nor Musk has officially committed to favoring a deal.
As we read it, the institutional questions went to the contracts behind the AI segment: whether Google had accepted the full capacity under its cloud agreement, and how much contracted Google capacity would stay available if a court halted gas turbines at Colossus 2, according to Reuters.
As we read it, the 90-day notice Reuters describes is the detail that links the two: SpaceX reported $7.56 billion of SI revenue in the quarter, according to its release, from what Reuters calls a handful of customers.
The framework sizes the cycle this way: “The total cycle: $725B Big Four + $50B Oracle + $13B Apple + $60B Neoclouds + $80B China + $60B Sovereigns + $48B Other = ~$1.04 trillion in 2026 compute capex, the first trillion-dollar year of compute capex in human history.”
As we read it, the investor questions on SpaceX’s compute contracts ask who in that cycle carries the risk when a customer can leave on about 90 days’ notice, as Reuters describes. The framework was published in May 2026 and does not discuss SpaceX’s investor questions.
What Is Not Established
The upvote counts measure what investors chose to ask, not any plan by either company. Reuters reported that neither company nor Musk has officially committed to favoring a deal, and Barclays’ view is an analyst suggestion. The Reuters report does not name the AI customers beyond Google and Anthropic or give the terms of each contract.
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A Tesla merger was the second-most upvoted question SpaceX investors submitted before the third-quarter call, with 26 upvotes, and the same question drew 128 on Tesla’s site, Reuters reported. As we read it, the institutional questions pointed somewhere else: how durable SpaceX’s AI revenue is when, per Reuters, the compute contracts behind it can be terminated on about 90 days’ notice.
A note on sourcing. The question list and upvote counts come from Reuters’ 20 October 2026 report, which we read in full via its MSN syndication; we have not seen SpaceX’s question platform or the Barclays note directly. Context on the companies’ ties comes from CNBC’s earnings live blog. Nothing here is financial or investment advice.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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