Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he would support a merger of SpaceX and Tesla. His comments came as SpaceX reported its first quarterly profit since it started trading on the stock market.
SpaceX made a net income of $4.4 billion from July to September. A year earlier, it made a loss of $1.1 billion. Its revenue rose 161 percent to $14.6 billion.
Analysts asked Musk about a possible deal during a call. He said he felt he was “tap dancing through a minefield,” but that joining the two companies would be “a good idea.”
SpaceX shares rose by nearly five percent in after-hours trading after his remarks, IOL reported.
Musk said both companies have set up special committees of independent directors to study the idea. He said shareholders asked for these committees. He said he cannot take part in their talks because he has a conflict of interest.
Musk is the chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla. He is also the chairman and chief technology officer of SpaceX. A regulatory filing showed he owned 48.4 percent of SpaceX on 30 June. He controls more than 82 percent of its voting power through super-voting shares.
Musk said the committees have not agreed on any terms, and there is no promise that they will. He said it would be wrong to treat a merger as certain.
Any deal would need the support of a majority of all Tesla shares, not only the shares used in a vote. Musk called this “quite a high hurdle.” He said the two firms could gain from working together on AI software, chip design, robotics and computing in space.
The profit came mainly from SpaceX’s AI division, which the company now calls “Super Intelligence.” The unit’s revenue rose more than nine times from a year earlier to $7.6 billion. It is now bigger than the Starlink satellite internet business as the company’s top source of sales.
SpaceX said the growth came from new cloud services deals, more people using its Grok chatbot, and its purchase of Cursor, an AI coding startup. The AI unit made an operating profit of $431 million, compared with a loss of $1.7 billion a year before.
Its cloud customers include Anthropic, which agreed in May to pay nearly $45 billion over three years for computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus data centres. Google signed on in June. It agreed to pay $920 million a month from October until June 2029.
Spending remains high. SpaceX invested $19.6 billion in the quarter, and $16.4 billion of that went to AI. This brings its spending for the first nine months of the year to $48 billion.
The company’s computing capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier. It expects to have about 2.5 to 3.0 gigawatts running by the end of this year. Musk said he was “fairly confident” SpaceX could add another 10 gigawatts in 2027. He said power, cooling and electrical equipment were “somewhat of a limiting factor.”
Average monthly revenue per consumer fell to $69, down from $83 a year earlier.
SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq on 12 June. Its share sale was priced at $135 a share and raised about $85.7 billion. Its first report as a listed company showed second quarter revenue of $7.8 billion and a net loss of $541 million.
SpaceX also completed the first paid flight of Starship, its giant rocket. The flight carried 26 next generation Starlink satellites into orbit.
Source: this article is based on reporting by IOL Technology. Image: IOL Technology. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.