Elon Musk says SpaceX and Tesla exploring largest merger in history

Tech mogul says tie-up has a ‘lot of merit’, given firms’ complementary work on AI.Elon Musk has revealed that SpaceX and Tesla are exploring a possible merger, a tie-up that would create a corporate colossus worth more than $3 trillion.Musk said on Tuesday that his two largest companies had established special committees to explore a merger.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4NATO to send additional patrol planes to Black Sea after drone attackslist 2 of 4Moment plane crashes on a busy highway in the USlist 3 of 4King Charles welcomes Omani sultan, hails peace efforts in UK state visitlist 4 of 4One year on: Has Kenya’s opposition lost its way without Raila Odinga?end of listThe SpaceX and Tesla CEO said the idea had a “lot of merit”, given the companies’ complementary work on Artificial Intelligence, but the committees had not come to any agreement on a proposal.“They’ve got to come up with something, and then that’s got to be put to the shareholders as a vote,” Musk said on a SpaceX earnings call.Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth of more than $900bn, said that a merger would need to clear the “high hurdle” of a 50 percent vote among Tesla shareholders“Some people out there assume that a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty, and I think that would be overstating it,” Musk said.“Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes. But at the end of the day, the shareholders have to be supportive of this.”Biggest corporate merger everA SpaceX-Tesla merger would rank as the biggest corporate tie-up in history, far exceeding the $1.25 trillion union between SpaceX and xAI in February.At current valuations, SpaceX and Tesla rank as the world’s seventh- and eleventh-largest companies, respectively, with a combined market capitalisation of about $3.5 trillion.Jerayr Haleblian, an expert in mergers and acquisitions at the University of California, Riverside, said a SpaceX-Tesla merger has “sound logic” to support it.