I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.
He absolutely could do it, just like he did when Tesla bought SolarCity. It just isn’t as easy when one of the companies is public than when both are private.
Tesla theoretically now owns a chunk of xAI... whose valuation will no doubt increase due to the internalized SpaceX acquisition. Append to this a future IPO, as discussed in the artice, presumably an eventual premium of 20-50% (reasonable, 14% purely for the ibankers when this will happen)... yields to an interesting bailout situation.
To me, the real question is why. The $2B from Tesla can't possibly move the needle for any party involved in this transaction. If this were to be work 50x as opposed to a potential 50% upside (hell, make it 2x for argument's sake) it still doesn't compute. So what's the actual reason.