SpaceX jumps 10%, Tesla rises on stunning revenue surge and possible merger

Shares of SpaceX and Tesla soared Wednesday after Elon Musk’s rocket firm reported blowout revenue and a possible merger with his EV maker – sending other tech stocks and the Nasdaq higher.The rocket and satellite firm was up 10% Wednesday morning after reporting third-quarter revenue of $14.6 billion – up a whopping 161% from the previous year.

That included roughly $7.6 billion from its AI division – now called SI, a nod to President Trump’s preferred term “super intelligence” – and marked a drastic shift for the company, which was previously leaning on revenue from its Starlink satellite business. Meanwhile, Musk – the world’s richest person – said during an earnings call Tuesday that he is weighing a historic merger with Tesla and that the boards of both companies have created committees to discuss a tie-up. “I do think there’s a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity, and there’s a lot to be gained from cooperating,” the near-trillionaire business mogul said.Shares of Tesla, which is set to report third-quarter earnings after the closing bell Wednesday, jumped 3.3% Wednesday morning. Dan Ives, partner at Yorkville Ives & Co, estimated there is an 80% to 90% chance that Tesla and SpaceX merge by the end of 2027 “for a number of strategic AI and data-driven reasons.” The Nasdaq rose 0.4% Wednesday, while space stocks like RocketLab, Intuitive Machines and AST SpaceMobile jumped 4.1%, 6.4% and 1.1%, respectively.SpaceX’s upbeat earnings came four months after its record-breaking IPO in June, which valued the company at roughly $1.75 trillion and raised more than $85 billion in net proceeds.It is now worth more than $2 trillion. A tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla could easily become the largest merger in history, as the automaker boasts its own $1.5 trillion market cap – despite struggling to sell its electric cars in markets worldwide.But Tesla got investor...