Bloomberg深度报道：马斯克力推SpaceX与特斯拉史上最大合并，目标2027年上半年宣布以赶在本届政府任内交割

Elon Musk has finally said the quiet part out loud: He’s fully behind a historic combination of SpaceX and Tesla Inc., his two most valuable companies, in what would be the biggest corporate transaction ever attempted.

Now comes the race to get it done.

Musk’s strongest public endorsement yet, delivered during the first of back-to-back earnings calls, comes at a moment of extraordinary influence for the world’s richest man. Having repaired his relationship with President Donald Trump, he’s regained access to the White House and tapped into fervent investor enthusiasm. Neither advantage is guaranteed to last.

With Trump approaching the second half of his final term and jittery markets threatening the exuberance underpinning Musk’s empire, there’s a push to announce a deal by the first half of 2027 so that it closes during this administration, according to people familiar with the matter. That would bring together companies with a combined market value of around $3.7 trillion. It would also consolidate Musk’s corporate power before a potentially less-accommodating political and financial environment takes hold.

The midterm elections are less than two weeks away. Democratic control of either chamber of Congress could expose Musk and his businesses to investigations and weaken a president already heading toward lame-duck status. A sustained selloff in chipmaker and artificial intelligence stocks, meanwhile, could erode the investor support needed to pull off such an audacious transaction.

“Musk and his advisers certainly want to take advantage of this window,” said Bill Birmingham, head of research at REX Financial. “The timing is both favorable and critical.”

SpaceX and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment on the targeted timing for a merger announcement.

Read More: Will SpaceX and Tesla Merge? Here’s What to Know

Musk’s endorsement was characteristically casual for an undertaking of this scale. He called the combination “a good idea,” while saying he would recuse himself and leave special committees to work through the details. He cautioned that winning over Tesla shareholders could be difficult and said neither committee had settled on terms.

Timing will depend on when Tesla’s board gets comfortable with the details, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. At SpaceX, shareholder approval presents less of an obstacle because Musk controls more than 80% of the voting power. While Tesla will be trickier — Musk owns about 20% of its stock — the board and shareholder base is less than a year removed from signing off on awarding the chief executive officer a trillion-dollar pay package.

Before this week, Musk was signaling SpaceX and Tesla were headed for a combination in less straightforward, albeit not-particularly-subtle ways. On Oct. 15, Tesla showcased a Roadster prototype designed in collaboration with SpaceX, complete with air thrusters that enabled the car to scale an inverted ramp and kickflip over other the rest of the automaker’s lineup.

SpaceX and Tesla already have business ties, most notably a joint effort to build a semiconductor plant in Texas called Terafab. Behind the scenes, the companies increasingly have been laying the groundwork for joint operations, with AI as a throughline.

As SpaceX was closing the acquisition of AI startup Cursor earlier this year, some Cursor employees met with Tesla staff about using the Grok 4.5 model, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla subsequently pushed internally to get engineers off Anthropic PBC’s Claude and onto Grok 4.5, Grok Bot and other Musk products for coding, the people said.

Musk has used Tesla employees to test some SpaceX products. Around June, he gave Tesla staffers early access to the X Money digital payment app, offering a $100 incentive to try it out, the people said. SpaceX and Tesla have also collaborated on the development of robot AI abilities, some of the people said.

Thousands of miles from the theatrical smoke and strobes of the Roadster reveal, a darker development playing out across war-torn Ukraine demonstrated the extent Musk has positioned his companies — and reportedly, himself — at the controls of technology crucial to a country’s very existence.

When Ukrainian forces fighting Russia noticed a slowdown in their military-grade version of SpaceX’s Starlink, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Trump and Musk of ordering the crucial satellite system throttled. Musk has deflected, saying any limits on speed or usage are up to Trump.

The spectacles and controversy obscure a larger shift: After spending parts of the past year on the defensive, Musk is again pressing his advantage.

Over a year ago, his relationship with Trump descended into an ugly public feud that briefly appeared to pry him away from the levers of power.

Musk’s image already had suffered from his slash-and-burn tour through Washington co-leading DOGE. The efficiency drive brought tens of thousands of job cuts and the abolition of international aid programs as he fed agencies “into the wood chipper,” as he put it. Tesla sales suffered, with consumers recoiling at his embrace of Trump and his chainsaw-wielding political persona.

After returning to Trump’s good graces, Musk has reopened his wallet while eschewing campaign events and cutting back on appearances in Washington.

“He probably saw the fallout that came from being in a front-and-center role,” said Libby Sander, director of executive education at Bond University in Queensland, Australia. “He’s been quite conscious of that in sort of stepping back and then getting back to business.”

Musk has demonstrated a knack for navigating his way out of messes — of his own making and otherwise — by some combination of showmanship, technical achievement and financial ambition that keeps investors engaged. SpaceX has regained their favor after a bumpy market debut that sent its shares well below the $135 initial offer price. The stock has steadily recovered, climbing 47% since Aug. 5.

“It’s a great time to use that stock as currency to do a deal,” said Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens. “There could be time pressure from a valuation perspective. If SpaceX’s stock price were to fall, it could complicate a purchase agreement.”

Musk has proved that timing can be crucial. When SpaceX went public in June, rendering Musk the world’s first trillionaire, the mood around the AI build-out was still largely intact. Now, concern is growing over the durability of the AI boom, amid fears that enormous upfront capital spending will take longer than expected to translate into profits and productivity gains.

SpaceX and Tesla themselves speak to the challenges of scaling AI. Both are expected to burn through billions of dollars a quarter for the foreseeable future in what would be a sudden turnabout for Tesla, whose electric vehicle business has steadily thrown off cash the last several years.

By contrast, cash has been the least of Musk’s concerns out on the campaign trail this midterm election cycle. He’s spending heavily to preserve a favorable political environment, shelling out about $369 million. He’s given more than a quarter-billion dollars just since the summer to help Republicans retain control, with much of that spending directed to Texas, where SpaceX has major installations and a Senate seat is at risk.

Read More: Musk’s Move to Flood Texas Senate Race With Cash Plays Into Talarico’s Hand

The stakes extend well beyond Musk’s relationship with Trump. SpaceX has become deeply embedded in the defense capabilities of the US and its allies, giving Musk a position with little precedent in modern corporate history. One possible analogue is Howard Hughes, the eccentric engineer whose businesses contributed to American aerospace and defense efforts for decades during the Cold War.

Unlike Tesla’s consumer-facing car business, SpaceX is relatively insulated from shifts in public sentiment. It has built a dominant position in rapid rocket launches and an increasingly important role in military services.

Its launch capabilities, orbital hardware and close ties to administration officials have helped produce Pentagon contracts narrowly tailored to favor the company, Bloomberg reported last month. This year alone, SpaceX won a $2 billion deal to provide satellites for a military communications network within the Golden Dome missile-defense program, an effort that could ultimately cost more than $1 trillion.

The national security sensitivities around SpaceX’s US government and defense contracts, and Tesla’s large, profitable China manufacturing footprint, loom as “key dynamics that are at odds with each other,” when it comes to winning regulatory and shareholder approvals for a deal, JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta told clients in a research note.

If Musk can overcome those challenges, a tie-up could add more than $110 billion to his fortune, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculations.

“Tesla has matured into a slower-growing but cash-rich company with a strong balance sheet,” Andrew Rocco, a stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research said. “On the other hand, SpaceX is a hyper-growth company that faces enormous capex concerns as it scales Starlink and Starship. Combined, the two companies have the magical elixir.”