Wall Street Can’t Stop Sizing Up A Tesla-SpaceX Merger Crystal Kim Fri, October 16, 2026 at 1:47 PM EDT 2 min read TSLA -3.55% Trade Tesla on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Tesla's reveal of a Roadster with rocket-esque thrusters has added fuel to speculation about a Tesla-SpaceX merger.
Barclays analysts said a deal could be announced within the next 12 months.
A futuristic car made a Tesla-SpaceX tie-up look all the more real.
When Elon Musk unveiled a redesigned Tesla Roadster, sending it hurtling through the air using rocket-esque thrusters, it revived visions of a merger between his auto-turned-robotics shop and his rocket-telecom-AI company.
The possibility has been raised before—by investors, Street analysts, and even Musk himself. But yesterday's arrival of the Roadster prototype has revived the conversation.
"The possibility of a Tesla/SpaceX merger has increasingly become the consensus expectation," Barclays' U.S. autos and mobility analysts, including Dan Levy, said in a report on Wednesday. Such a move, they said, would make sense given the companies' overlapping products, potential financial benefits, and Musk's "desire to consolidate control."
The surface-level rationale for a merger would be "vertical integration," according to Barclays. That, in effect, means that if Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX) were working together to build something, like a chip factory or a car, it would be more efficient for them to be under the same roof.
Terafab, a chip manufacturing project announced in March, would be a "key driver," according to Barclays, because Musk has previously said that the factory will be necessary for both Tesla's and SpaceX's compute needs.
The investment bank also flagged overlapping products such as Tesla's Optimus robots and robotaxis using SpaceX's AI, and the Roadster. Plus, SpaceX would benefit from Tesla's free cash flow, Barclays' analysts said. Wall Street analysts don't expect SpaceX to start generating positive free cash flow until 2031, according to Visible Alpha.
While there are many potential ways a deal could shake out, a SpaceX acquisition of Tesla in an "all-stock transaction is widely viewed as a more likely" structure, Barclays said. That would give Musk more than 50% voting power of the combined company, satisfying his previously stated objective of owning 25% of Tesla.
Barclays analysts see two potential paths forward: A merger announcement ahead of a possible Tesla annual shareholder meeting in December, or an announcement separate from the meeting, which would make the "when" more up in the air. Under that second scenario, a deal could be announced within the next 12 months, Barclays said.
