Liam Denning, Columnist

Musk’s Reasons for Creating Musk Inc. Look Banal

February 2, 2026 at 10:30 AM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Empire building.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP

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Owning Tesla Inc. is essentially a bet on whatever Elon Musk says he will do next. One thing he might do next, according to Bloomberg News, is merge Tesla with his unlisted rockets shop, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX. Or maybe Tesla will buy Musk’s unlisted artificial intelligence business, xAI. Perhaps all three will merge, or not at all. Decisions, decisions.

Musk has talked about an ostensible industrial logic of convergence centered on launching (SpaceX) solar-powered (Tesla) datacenters for AI (xAI) into space. Synergies around autonomy, using the Grok chatbot in cars and turning those same cars into edge-computing assets, are also talked about. Tesla investors pushed the stock up more than 3% on Friday in an evident vote of confidence for whichever direction Musk picks.