SpaceX IPO Demands Investor Trust in Musk’s Entangled Empire

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead, with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy, plus global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily podcast with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:32)
All right. Now to what we know will already be one of the most talked about stories in business and market events of 2026, no doubt about it, and that is the Friday initial public offering of SpaceX. In today's Bloomberg Big Take, the team of Dana Hull and Carmen Arroya report that the SpaceX IPO is a bet on Elon Musk's vision of an industrial empire combining hardware, software, and artificial intelligence. It is also an investor bet and trust in what is Elon's entangled empire. There are a lot of moving parts when you get down to it. Individual who's responsible for kind of tracking all of these different parts is Dana Hull. She's Bloomberg News senior reporter. She's a part of the team that keeps an eye on all things Elon. She joins us from San Francisco. Dana, good to have you here with Emily and myself. We've talked to you a lot over the years about the interesting empire that is all Elon's.
When you think about this, is this an interesting moment in time? And as you said, requires a lot of investor trust in these visions that maybe have yet to fully pan out by Elon Musk?

**Dana Hull** (1:37)
Yeah, I think that's right, Carol. And what we're seeing or what I'm seeing is that the companies are starting to converge around AI. If you go back 10, 15 years, they were very different companies. Tesla was trying to make electric cars and bring them into the mainstream, SpaceX was focused on reusable rockets, but Tesla and SpaceX have achieved those initial goals, and now the mission has really changed. They are both pitching themselves as AI companies and they need each other.
They have all this overlap now, so they're coordinating on building a chip fab. There's just so many ways in which they are working together and overlapping. If you command F Tesla in the SpaceX S1, it is astonishing how many times the name Tesla comes up in that filing. So I just think we're seeing more and more overlap, more sharing of resources, sharing of engineering talent. And then the big question is, okay, what point do these two companies merge, right? Like let's get through the SpaceX IPO first and see where the valuation settles. But I think everyone kind of is wondering, are SpaceX and Tesla going to merge? If so, when, what kind of timeline, and then who would acquire who?

**Tim Stenovec** (2:46)
I'm wondering if you could kind of just talk through why the entanglement of the companies is something that investors need to be thinking about. Before you came on, Carol and I were just talking about like, how are these two stocks going to trade? You know, is an investor in Tesla going to sell out of Tesla and buy SpaceX? Like, why are we all focused on the fact that these companies are very meshed together?

**Dana Hull** (3:12)
I think it's because it raises a real big question about valuation. Like for the SpaceX valuation, which is so high and there's been some reporting just in the last hour about it being oversubscribed. So many things have to go right. Like the Starship rocket has to work in order to get the orbital data centers up in space. And like, so there's just a lot riding on that whole plan. And then as it becomes a bigger company with all of these entanglements, you know, remember it acquired XAI, which in turn had acquired X, which used to be Twitter. Like you're hiding things like GROK within this bigger company. And so how do you figure out the revenue for those business units? It just gets a little murkier.
And then with Tesla, as we have reported, like one in five cyber trucks sold in the fourth quarter went to SpaceX and Elon's other companies. So what is the true demand for that vehicle? Is that vehicle going to stay in the lineup? So, you know, there's just a lot of, I don't want to say robbing Peter to pay Paul. I think there's just a lot of synergies, a lot of overlaps and getting to the true valuation for investors is just going to be increasingly tricky.

**Carol Massar** (4:21)
I always think about that, right? And you guys go into it so well, Dana, in this story about like the accounting between all of these companies and whether or not we have a really clear view of the transactions between the different companies and then go back to the valuations. I mean, do we have a real clear picture? Is that part of also investor concerns?