New York, May 21, 2026, 13:12 EDT
- Tesla shares were nearly flat after an early rise, trading around $417 in early afternoon New York trade.
- SpaceX’s IPO filing sharpened investor focus on Tesla’s ties to Elon Musk’s wider group of companies.
- The next test is whether Tesla can turn autonomy and AI spending into revenue, not just market narrative.
Tesla shares gave up an early gain on Thursday as investors weighed a fresh SpaceX initial public offering filing, new disclosures about financial ties among Elon Musk’s companies, and Tesla’s latest push to widen its supervised self-driving software outside the United States.
The stock was recently down a fraction at $417.23, after opening at $422.35 and rising as high as $426.79. The move left Tesla roughly in line with a softer technology tape: SPY, an exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500, fell 0.3%, while QQQ, a Nasdaq-100 tracker, slipped 0.5%.
The reason it matters now is simple. Tesla’s market value has long leaned on expectations for artificial intelligence, robotaxis and software, not only car sales. SpaceX’s planned public listing could add to that story — or give investors another public way to buy into Musk without using Tesla stock.
SpaceX filed on Wednesday for an IPO, short for initial public offering, a sale of shares to public investors. Reuters reported the company picked Nasdaq as its venue, while analysts and traders debated whether the listing would strengthen Tesla’s “Musk ecosystem” premium or dilute it. Reuters
Dan Ives, head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, said he believes SpaceX and Tesla will “eventually merge into one company” in 2027. Dennis Dick, a proprietary trader at Triple D Trading, took the other side of the question, asking whether Tesla loses “some of the luster” once investors have “another way to play Elon Musk.” Reuters
The filing also gave Tesla investors numbers to argue over. Reuters reported that SpaceX and xAI bought about $650 million in goods and services from Tesla last year, including $506 million of Megapack battery systems and $131 million of Cybertrucks; Tesla also owns nearly 19 million SpaceX Class A shares after a $2 billion investment.
Tesla’s own quarterly filing showed the company invested $2.00 billion in SpaceX common stock in March and recognized $87 million of revenue from SpaceX’s purchase of Megapack products in the first quarter. Those are related-party transactions — deals between companies linked by common executives, directors or owners — and they are likely to draw more scrutiny as SpaceX moves toward the public market.
Tesla’s core business still has to carry the weight. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $22.39 billion, up 16% from a year earlier, and net income attributable to common stockholders of $477 million. It delivered 358,023 vehicles and deployed 8.8 gigawatt-hours of energy storage products in the quarter.
But the spending bill is rising. Tesla said capital expenditures were $2.49 billion in the first quarter and that it expects more than $25 billion of capital spending in 2026, driven by AI initiatives, compute infrastructure, data centers, manufacturing lines and charging and service expansion.
The China angle helped keep the stock in the conversation. Tesla said Full Self-Driving Supervised is now available in countries including China, according to CnEVPost. Full Self-Driving Supervised is Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance package; Tesla says it still requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous.
Competition is moving too. Xpeng, a Chinese Tesla rival, said on Monday it had begun mass production of its first robotaxi in Guangzhou and is targeting fully driverless operations by early 2027, Reuters reported. That puts Tesla’s China software rollout into a sharper frame: not just regulatory progress, but a race for paid autonomy features in the world’s largest car market.
Musk has kept the target bold. He said this week that cars without human safety monitors would become more widespread in the United States later this year, and predicted that “probably 90% of all distance driven” would be handled by AI within five to 10 years. Reuters also noted Tesla operates robotaxis in Austin, Dallas and Houston, though its reporters found long waits and limited availability in recent tests. Reuters
The risk is that the story gets ahead of execution. A public SpaceX could siphon off some Musk-focused capital, Tesla’s related-party dealings could invite governance concerns, and delays in robotaxis, China software adoption or AI infrastructure returns could make the company’s heavy spending harder for investors to defend. For now, the shares are telling a quieter story than the headlines: up early, then back near flat.
