Washington (United States) (AFP) – Elon Musk said Tuesday he would back a merger of SpaceX and Tesla, as his rocket and AI company reported its first quarterly profit since going public, driven by deals to rent out computing power to AI firms. Asked about a possible tie-up on a call with analysts, Musk said he felt he was “tap dancing through a minefield,” but that a combination would be “a good idea.” Shares in SpaceX shot up nearly five percent in after-hours trading following the comments.
Musk said special committees of independent directors at both SpaceX and Tesla have been set up to study the idea at the request of shareholders. He added that he could not take part in their talks because he has a conflict of interest. Musk is chief executive of both companies, and also serves as chairman and chief technology officer of SpaceX. He owned 48.4 percent of SpaceX as of June 30, according to a regulatory filing, and controls more than 82 percent of its voting power through super-voting shares. He holds about 20 percent of Tesla.
The committees have not agreed on the terms of any deal, and there is no guarantee they will, Musk said, cautioning that it would be overstating it to treat a merger as a certainty. Any deal would need the backing of a majority of all Tesla shares, not just those cast in a vote, which Musk called “quite a high hurdle.” He said the two companies could gain from working together on AI software, chip design, robotics, and space-based computing. His remarks came after SpaceX posted net income of $4.4 billion for the July-September period, compared with a loss of $1.1 billion a year earlier. Revenue jumped 161 percent to $14.6 billion.
The quarterly results follow a bumpy start on Wall Street. SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on June 12 after an IPO priced at $135 a share that raised about $85.7 billion. Its first earnings report as a listed company showed second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion and a net loss of $541 million. The AI division, which SpaceX now calls “Super Intelligence,” drove the turnaround. Super Intelligence is US President Donald Trump’s preferred term for AI. The unit’s revenue rose more than nine times from a year earlier to $7.6 billion, overtaking the Starlink satellite internet business as the company’s largest source of sales.
SpaceX credited new cloud services agreements, wider adoption of its Grok chatbot, and its acquisition of Cursor, an artificial intelligence coding startup. SpaceX’s cloud customers include Anthropic, which agreed in May to pay nearly $45 billion over three years for computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus data centers. Google signed on in June, agreeing to pay $920 million a month from October through June 2029. The AI unit turned an operating profit of $431 million, compared with a loss of $1.7 billion a year earlier. As with other AI companies, spending remains heavy.
SpaceX invested $19.6 billion in the quarter, $16.4 billion of it in AI, bringing capital spending for the first nine months of the year to $48 billion. Its computing capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier. Musk said he was “fairly confident” SpaceX could bring an additional 10 gigawatts of computing capacity online in 2027. That would come on top of the roughly 2.5 to 3.0 gigawatts it expects to have running by the end of this year. He added that power, cooling, and electrical equipment were “somewhat of a limiting factor.”
Revenue at the Starlink satellite internet unit grew 69 percent to $5.2 billion, and consumer subscribers reached 13.6 million. Average monthly revenue per consumer, however, fell to $69 from $83 a year earlier. SpaceX also completed the first revenue-generating flight of Starship, the giant rocket central to Musk’s Mars ambitions and to deploying satellites at scale. The flight carried 26 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit.
© 2024 AFP
