"It might make life a little easier for Elon". SpaceX has not ruled out a merger with Tesla

The two Elon Musk-led companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are working toward the same goals, Gwynne Shotwell, president of aerospace company SpaceX, told CNBC on June 12. Combining them could "make life a little easier" for Musk, she joked. Business Insider saw the SpaceX president's words as a hint of a possible future merger.

"It's an exciting new world for us. I do believe that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are our future, especially when you look at the field of artificial intelligence," Shotwell told CNBC. In response to a CNBC reporter's suggestion that a SpaceX and Tesla merger might be in the future, Shotwell joked, "Actually, it might make Elon's life a little easier."

"There's no question that there will be synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our future, there's definitely a kind of convergence of what we're all trying to achieve going forward," she said. However, Shotwell added that right now she is focused on maintaining SpaceX's current operations and ambitious plans to expand the aerospace company's business, rather than an alliance with Musk's other major publicly traded corporation.

"I'm at least not focused on that part of the future," she concluded.

Shotwell's statements come as SpaceX prepares to begin trading Friday after raising $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. The rocket company has a valuation of $1.75 trillion, while Tesla's market capitalization is $1.499 trillion. Tesla's securities are down 0.32% at the June 12 premarket.

Elon Musk has been hinting at optimizing his massive business empire for years, and in recent weeks analysts and investors have been increasingly discussing the possibility of a Tesla and SpaceX merger, Business Insider (BI) notes. Thus, in May, Dan Ives, managing director of investment company Wedbush Securities, predicted that aerospace company SpaceX and electric car manufacturer Tesla will merge into a single company in 2027.

The two companies have shared employees and board members in the past, and are already collaborating on Musk 's ambitious Terafab chip manufacturing project, which is estimated to cost $55 billion to build, an initiative aimed at creating semiconductors for both SpaceX's AI satellites and Tesla's robotaxis and humanoid robots.

Tesla has also integrated xAI's Grok AI model into its electric cars and last year invested $2 billion in Elon Musk's AI startup. That investment was converted into a stake in SpaceX when the aerospace company merged with xAI in February.

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