SpaceX investors, ahead of results, press Musk on Tesla merger

By Akash Sriram

Oct 20 (Reuters) - SpaceX shareholders want to know when the rocket maker will merge with Tesla, bringing together two of Elon Musk's biggest companies in a union that investors have long speculated about.

"When will SpaceX merge with Tesla?" was the second-most upvoted question — drawing 26 upvotes — submitted by investors to SpaceX management ahead of its third-quarter earnings webcast on Tuesday. The same question received 128 upvotes on the Tesla investor relations site. 

Barclays suggested last week that a deal could be announced before Tesla's annual meeting, with SpaceX the likelier acquirer, though neither company nor Musk has officially committed to favoring a deal.

LUNAR LANDER PROGRESS QUESTIONED

The top-voted question, with 38 upvotes, was on the progress of Starship's lunar lander hardware, in a list that showed retail investors were focused on Starship while analysts and institutional shareholders pressed for detail on AI revenue and spending. 

SpaceX has made progress testing Starship, but key technologies needed to turn the giant rocket into a lunar lander, including refueling it in orbit, have yet to be fully demonstrated. The company's profitable satellite internet service, Starlink, is helping bankroll heavy spending on chips, terrestrial data centers and Grok, but losses at the AI businesses have ballooned.

While the investor questions list ahead of its second-quarter earnings in August was topped by lighthearted, meme-driven submissions, this quarter's top questions leaned more toward corporate plans, with novelty entries mostly near the bottom.

It was not clear which questions executives would take when the webcast starts at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT).

"What share of AI revenue is now under multi-year commitments, and what gives management confidence AI can grow at or above the company's overall rate for several years?" a prospective investor asked, earning no upvotes. SpaceX's AI revenue comes from a handful of customers, including Alphabet's Google and AI lab Anthropic, and the compute contracts can be terminated on about 90 days' notice.

One institutional investor asked how much contracted Google capacity would stay available if a court halted gas turbines at the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. Another asked whether Google had accepted the full capacity under its cloud agreement and whether SpaceX expected to earn the full contractual monthly rate.

An analyst's six-part question on Starlink satellite capacity, launch priorities and capital spending drew no upvotes.

Lighter submissions were scattered through the list. One user asked whether SpaceX would land a Tesla Roadster — a sports car with rocket thrusters for short jumps in the air — on the moon, adding, "(it) would be awesome."

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Matthew Lewis)