If you think Elon Musk’s businesses will collectively change the world economy over the next four years, what do you actually do with that belief? This is a question that keeps coming up in investment conversations these days, and it’s not subtle. Tesla is listed on the Nasdaq for public trading. Earlier this year, SpaceX went public with the ticker SPCX. Additionally, there is a 77% chance that the two businesses will combine before the end of 2028, according to prediction market Kalshi. That is no longer a fringe viewpoint. It’s a popular one with actual odds.
Tesla’s shares are currently trading at about $358, and the company’s market capitalization is approximately $1.42 trillion. The market capitalization of SpaceX is roughly $1.82 trillion. Already one of the largest paired market caps of any two related entities in U.S. financial history, their combined valuation is in the range of $3.2 trillion. However, the 2030 bull market is predicated on the notion that the present figures are just the start.
Between now and 2030, Tesla’s narrative will focus more on what electric vehicles made possible than on the vehicles themselves. The EV industry served as the foundation for Tesla’s software capabilities, data footprint, and manufacturing scale. All of that is applied to robotaxis and humanoid robots in the following chapter. A key component of the near-term revenue thesis is the Cybercab, which was created from the ground up as an autonomous vehicle. The economics of operating a robotaxi fleet at scale are greatly impacted by Tesla’s self-driving system’s use of a camera-only neural network instead of pricey lidar. The cost advantage could be significant if regulatory approvals are granted, which is still a significant if. According to Morningstar, Tesla will generate $228 billion in revenue by 2030, and its operating margin will rise to 28%. This suggests earnings per share in the range that would support a stock price that is much higher than it is now.
Modeling the Optimus humanoid robot is more difficult. Musk has stated that he thinks it will eventually become Tesla’s biggest source of income. This seems audacious when you take into account the company’s track record of making lofty claims and then, over time, only partially fulfilling them. The production process has begun. It’s early. The real question is how quickly things will get better from here.
A different kind of wager is SpaceX. The company is divided into three business segments: its rocket launch division, Starlink satellite internet, and an AI infrastructure division that includes the Grok AI system and the coding platform Cursor. As the demand for broadband grows worldwide, Starlink is currently the biggest and most lucrative component. The division with the fastest growth is AI. Anthropic recently committed $84.5 billion to become an anchor AI infrastructure customer for SpaceX, which is by no means a small sum. According to Morgan Stanley, SpaceX will generate $175 billion in revenue in 2027 and $289 billion in 2028, compounding at a rate that, if execution continues, would put Goldman Sachs’ $470 billion estimate for 2030 within reach.
Even though the structure is still unknown, the merger rumors are worth considering. An announcement might be made prior to Tesla’s annual meeting on December 6, 2026, according to Barclays analyst Dan Levy. The model that the majority of analysts have sketched out calls for an all-stock transaction in which SpaceX purchases Tesla at a premium of about 30%, giving Tesla shareholders about 3.16 SpaceX shares for each share they own. The combined company would generate an estimated $1.16 trillion in revenue in 2031. When a ten-times forward price-to-sales multiple is applied, the valuation approaches $11 trillion, with an implied per-share price of about $450. Over a four-year period, that would be more than a three-fold return from the current price of SpaceX.
It’s important to be realistic about the number of conditions that must be met for that result to occur. Rollouts of Robotaxi rely on regulatory agencies, which have traditionally moved slowly. Large-scale Optimus production is genuinely unproven. The vehicle at the core of SpaceX’s most ambitious plans, Starship, a heavy-lift rocket, is still undergoing active development. Earth-to-Earth cargo, orbital data centers, and the chip manufacturing joint venture that SpaceX and Tesla are developing together are all legitimate initiatives, but there is a significant gap between initiative and revenue-generating business.
From the outside, it seems that the investment case for SpaceX and Tesla toward 2030 is not really about the success of any one product category. It concerns whether the networked architecture Musk has spent twenty years creating—rocketry, automobiles, satellites, robots, chips, and artificial intelligence—combines to create something bigger than its constituent parts. That is as much a wager on an individual as it is on a collection of companies. It has previously paid off. The next four years will determine whether it does so once more.
