For years, the sprawling companies in Elon Musk’s business empire have worked closely together.
Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, et al. have behaved like pieces of a shared ecosystem inside Elon Inc. — buying one another’s products, investing billions across company lines, sharing software and materials, and moving employees between ventures.
Now, the overlap is leading to consolidation. In the past year alone, Musk’s empire has already consolidated from six major companies to four after his xAI acquired social network X and SpaceX acquired xAI.
Those tie-ups are fueling a bigger acquisition question: Is he eyeing a mega-merger between aerospace company SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla?
That speculation renewed on Friday when SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell was asked on CNBC about combining the two.
“That might make Elon’s life a little easier, actually,” she said. “There’s no question that there’s synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures, definitely, there’s a convergence of a kind of what we’re all trying to accomplish in the future.”
That merger would be the most dramatic step yet, collapsing two of Musk’s best-known companies into a single corporate giant.
Even without a deal, his companies are already increasingly intertwined. Here’s how:
Tesla and SpaceX are buying from each other
SpaceX is a major customer of Tesla’s energy business.
In SpaceX’s S-1 securities filing, the rocket and AI company unveiled that it spent $697 million on Tesla Megapack battery products across 2024 and 2025.
SpaceX is also giving some technology back to Tesla. Musk has said that the carmaker’s long-awaited next-generation Roadster will be a “Tesla/SpaceX collab” and feature SpaceX-built cold-gas thrusters. The hyper-powered sports car’s launch event has been repeatedly delayed after Musk penciled an unveil in for April 1.
“It’s gonna be really cool, and it’s gonna have some rocket technology in it,” he said during a 2024 sit-down with Don Lemon.
Tesla’s AI ambitions are increasingly tied to xAI
Tesla’s January earnings disclosed that it had agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI, with a related “framework agreement” to explore additional collaboration opportunities.
Tesla has already integrated xAI’s Grok into its vehicles, allowing drivers to chat with the AI and use it to add and edit navigation destinations.
Videos have shown early versions of Tesla’s in-development Optimus robot using xAI’s Grok AI chatbot for its voice.
SpaceX and The Boring Company have bought Tesla vehicles
Aside from full-blown investments or acquisitions, the most visible example of Musk’s companies coordinating might be Tesla’s vehicle sales to his tunnel-building startup.
The Boring Company, which operates tunnels in Las Vegas and Texas, uses fleets of Tesla vehicles to transport passengers through its underground systems. The tunnel builder has also constructed tunnels around Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin.
It isn’t alone. SpaceX reported in its paperwork ahead of the public offering that it bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks.
Musk’s employees move between companies
Musk has repeatedly drawn on employees from one company to support others in his portfolio.
In 2022, about a month after Musk bought Twitter — now known as X — he sent roughly 50 Tesla employees to the social-media company’s headquarters to help overhaul its code-review systems, according to court filings.
Musk later argued in court that the Tesla employees had “volunteered” to do the work and that their temporary reassignment should not concern Tesla’s board.
Executives share overlapping functions on several of Musk’s companies, too, according to org charts obtained by Business Insider.
For example, Charlie Kuehmann, the vice president of materials and engineering at Tesla, also holds the same title at SpaceX.
It’s all par for the course for ‘Elon Inc.’
The growing web of internal deals has fueled discussion among investors and analysts about whether Musk’s companies are evolving into something closer to a single, vertically integrated enterprise.
And it’s not clear if it’ll stop at SpaceX combining with xAI.
“In Tesla’s case, an important factor to consider is that investors are buying into Elon Musk’s vision for the future as much as they are buying into an automaker or clean energy company,” Lou Whiteman, a contributing analyst at The Motley Fool, told Business Insider in January.
“Since this group of companies, public and private, combine to represent Elon Musk’s full vision of the future, I’d bet that many investors are happy to see Tesla involved in all aspects of ‘Elon Inc.'”
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