Dobby

Why I’m Against a SpaceX-Tesla Merger I see some people trying to frame this debate in a strange way, but the real question isn’t whether SpaceX is a great company or how much synergy there could be between SpaceX & Tesla. I fully recognize SpaceX’s potential & obviously there could be significant synergies between the 2 companies. But that is completely separate from whether the 2 companies actually need to merge. A lot of long-term Tesla investors, including myself, didn’t invest in Tesla simply because of Elon. Robotaxi, FSD, Optimus, & other businesses that Tesla has invested in for yrs, even sacrificing short-term EPS along the way, are finally getting closer to bearing fruit.   I’m not investing just because of Elon. I’m investing because Tesla has these specific business models with a real chance of becoming reality & Elon is the one leading the company.   Even Tesla, however, has changed its plans multiple times over the past few yrs & the stock has gone through tremendous volatility along the way. (Ex, the target of selling 20M cars/yr by 2030 eventually disappeared from official materials, while the center of gravity of the business shifted significantly toward Robotaxi. The revenue model has also shifted somewhat from hardware toward software. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with continually revisiting the scenario as circumstances change. I think that’s the right thing to do.) The problem is that SpaceX has to be viewed on a much longer time horizon than Tesla & its long-term plans are much rougher. If even Tesla’s plans have changed this much, I can’t even imagine how many changes & uncertainties SpaceX could go through over the yrs. I simply don’t want to go through that level of uncertainty & volatility all over again with a business that is much more long-term & still far less defined.   In addition, even if a merger really has to happen, I don’t think now is the right time. Robotaxi, FSD & others are finally starting to bear fruit, but in my view, not even a half of half of their potential value is reflected in Tesla’s stock price yet. I don’t think it would be too late to discuss a merger after at least some of that value has been proven through actual results & properly recognized by the market. There is simply no reason to lock in the relative valuations & exchange % between Tesla & SpaceX now, before Tesla’s upside has even had a chance to materialize. On top of that, Tesla shareholders have already shouldered a significant burden in the name of Elon’s other ‘greater causes(?)’. During the Twitter acquisition, Elon sold nearly 100M Tesla shares & Tesla shareholders were the ones who had to absorb the selling pressure. Yet X eventually became part of xAI & xAI then merged into SpaceX, leaving SpaceX as the one ultimately benefiting from it. The ironic part is that X represented roughly 30% of xAI’s value, while Tesla spent $2B investing in xAI & ended up with less than a 1% stake. So from my perspective, Tesla shareholders have already absorbed all kinds of costs & risks along the way. And now we’re being asked to share Tesla’s future upside with SpaceX without being properly compensated for it. That’s difficult for me to accept.   And one last thing... As I’m writing this, there’s something else that I’m worried about. I wonder whether Elon has already started losing interest in Tesla & whether he’s trying to structure any potentially lucrative new businesses around SpaceX whenever possible. To put it bluntly, the reason I use Grok today is NOT because Grok is such a great LLM. I use it because it’s integrated with my Tesla car. There could clearly be many new business opportunities that emerge from integrations like this... $TSLA $SPCX #Tesla #SpaceX