I have pretty mixed feelings about Tesla straight up acquiring SpaceX. Even with its substantially simple model, the general public vastly misunderstands the core business, and effectively give very little value to Tesla Energy, insurance, Teslabot, and to some extent even the robotaxi business. Adding SpaceX / Starlink to this is going to be very messy for the investing public to understand. Keep in mind that the regulars on this forum have invested a lot of time and energy understanding not just Tesla, but to some extent all of Elon's other ventures.
Secondly, those of us who have been around the TSLA / SCTY merger saw the amount of litigation Elon was dragged through, even as the purchase price was not significant for Elon (because he had approximately the same ownership stake in both entities) and he recused himself from those discussions.
Finally, there are investors of all stripes - namely those who want clean tech exposure, those who want exposure to autonomy, and those who want exposure to space, and those who want exposure to cash gushing ISP. Bundling all of them up in one entity, while good for some of us who want to watch one ticker, is inconvenient for most investors. This would result in what is called a conglomerate discount, where whole < sum of parts. Again as market historians can tell, conglomerates have come in and gone out of fashion. In fact at one point there used to be a conglomerate premium because of all the potential synergies between these disparate lines, but that was a long time ago.
For all these reasons, it makes sense to keep these businesses separate. Another option is to have an umbrella co ticker, but also list the subsidiaries as their own stub shares. So there will be a spaceX stub, a Tesla stub and potentially other stubs, but also a X share that would be the sum of all these. I believe Liberty media does this with various share classes. (I got a headache the last time I tried to figure what the heck was what in that mess of similar sounding names).
All that said, Elon is the one who can say eff it, I'll just float X and delist everything else, because it simplifies collaboration between all these entities. I do think he is past the point of how market values all these pieces. And honestly, as the lead contender to be the most valuable co in a few years, the onus is on the markets and analysts to figure out how to value this beast, and not the other way round.
By 2030, we plan to be on the road to irrelevancy!
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