Elon Musk’s unveiling of a new “flying” Tesla on a SpaceX site this week has observers buzzing about an out-of-this-world merger between the two companies, with Kalshi bettors putting the odds of such a combo at over 50% for early next year.
Banking giant Barclays went as far as to say a merger could happen before Tesla’s annual general meeting, scheduled to take place by Dec. 6.
“The possibility of a Tesla/SpaceX merger has increasingly become the consensus expectation,” Barclays analysts wrote this week, according to Bloomberg.
“While it’s possible that the timing of a TSLA/SPCX merger announcement could slip later into October or perhaps even until early November, we believe such timing may increasingly challenge merger approval as part of the AGM,” they added.
The prospect of merging the nearly $2 trillion SpaceX, which went public to great fanfare in June, and the roughly $1.4 trillion Tesla has prediction market bettors salivating.
On the question “When will Tesla and SpaceX merge?,” Kalshi has low odds for the rest of this year but puts the chances of the combo happening by March 1 at around 50%. The odds go up to nearly 60% for an April 1 deadline, with nearly 80% chances by the end of next year.
The notion of Musk folding his electric automaker into SpaceX surfaced in the buildup to the summer IPO, with SpaceX buying about $100 million worth of Cybertrucks in 2025. Musk ended up merging SpaceX with his artificial intelligence business xAI, instead.
But the Tesla-SpaceX collabs have continued, with SpaceX buying nearly $300 million worth of Tesla’s utility-scale batteries, known as Megapacks, for its AI data centers in the second quarter of 2026.
Most recently, observers took Musk’s decision to unveil Tesla’s new “flying” Roadster on a SpaceX test facility in Texas as a sign of a deeper partnership to come.
“You’re going to see the results of what happens when you have a collaboration with the world’s best car company and the world’s best rocket company,” Musk said before the show.
“This is the culmination of incredible work by Tesla and SpaceX engineers working closely together to make something that you haven’t seen in any movie, that is better than any James Bond car, better than – well, I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he added.
Additional group projects by Tesla and SpaceX include an effort to make semiconductors for Tesla’s vehicles and robots, along with a chip just for SpaceX’s AI satellites, Bloomberg noted.
Tesla overlaps “on so many fronts with SpaceX,” as Musk put it on a recent earnings call.
Barclays noted challenges to a merger include the need to win shareholder votes.
“Roughly 11% of total outstanding votes in Tesla’s 2025 AGM voting were ‘Broker non-votes,’ which are effectively counted as ‘Against’ votes, and we suspect Tesla will attempt to increase shareholder participation in a potential SpaceX combination vote,” Bloomberg quoted the analysts as saying.
The merger would also require regulatory approval.
SpaceX and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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