The Musk group's economic weight in autumn 2026

One person leads, founded or controls five companies that reach into cars, rockets, satellite internet, artificial intelligence, brain implants and tunnels. In autumn 2026 the group looks different from a year ago. SpaceX is a listed company. xAI and X are now inside SpaceX. And Tesla owns a slice of SpaceX. This article sums up what each company is, what it has disclosed and what has only been reported.

A note on words. Disclosed means the company itself published the figure, for example in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Reported means a news outlet or analyst wrote it, and the company has not confirmed it.

Schematic diagram. Simplified; not to scale.

Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3 2026 and produced 464,391, its SEC filing shows. It also deployed 13.7 GWh of energy storage. Deliveries were 2.1% below Q3 2025 but above the analyst average that Tesla itself compiled.

The quarterly report came out on 21 October. According to Electrek's summary, revenue was $28.05 billion, roughly flat on the year. GAAP net income fell 43% to $787 million. Capital spending was $4.73 billion in the quarter and research and development rose 69% to $2.76 billion. Tesla held $45.4 billion in cash and investments.

Tesla says it started Robotaxi rides with Cybercabs in Austin on 3 September. The humanoid robot programme has its own story: see Tesla Optimus: where it stands in autumn 2026.

Scale beyond one quarter: Tesla had 134,785 employees at the end of 2025. It makes things in California, New York, Texas and Nevada, and in China and Germany. In the electric-car market it is no longer the volume leader. BYD sold 762,478 battery-electric cars in the same quarter.

AI illustration (artist's depiction).

SpaceX filed its prospectus in May. It priced its shares at $135 on 11 June 2026 and started trading on Nasdaq the next day. It raised $75 billion, at a market value of about $1.8 trillion. Musk reportedly owned about 42% of SpaceX before the offering.

The prospectus shows three businesses:

• Connectivity (Starlink): $11.4 billion revenue in 2025, with $4.4 billion operating income. More than 9,600 satellites and 10.3 million subscribers at the end of March 2026.
• Space (launches): $4.1 billion revenue in 2025, with an operating loss of $657 million. SpaceX says it has spent more than $15 billion on Starship.
• AI (xAI): an operating loss of $6.4 billion in 2025.

SpaceX published its third-quarter results on 20 October 2026. As reported by Pulse 2.0, revenue was $14.6 billion, up 161% on the year, and net income was $4.4 billion, against a $1.1 billion loss a year earlier. Starlink revenue grew 69% to $5.25 billion, and the launch business brought in $1.77 billion. Starlink had about 13.6 million consumer subscribers at the end of September, Tesla Oracle reports from the release. For comparison, the second quarter ended with $7.8 billion revenue, a $541 million net loss and 12 million subscribers.

AI illustration (artist's depiction).

On 2 February 2026 SpaceX announced it would acquire xAI in an all-stock deal. The deal valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. X, the former Twitter, had earlier been merged into xAI in a $33 billion deal. xAI raised a $20 billion round in January 2026, per Sacra.

The AI business grew fast but costs a lot. In Q1 2026 it brought in $818 million revenue against a $2.5 billion operating loss, the prospectus shows. In Q3 its revenue was reported at $7.56 billion, while $16.4 billion of SpaceX's $19.6 billion quarterly capital spending went into it. Its Colossus data centres in Memphis provide about 1.0 gigawatt of compute, according to SpaceX.

Neuralink builds a brain implant, a device that reads brain activity so a paralysed person can control a computer. In January 2026 the company said 21 participants were enrolled in its trials worldwide (Reuters). Its last widely reported round was $650 million at a $9 billion valuation in June 2025.

The Boring Company digs tunnels. In September 2026 it reportedly raised $3 billion at a $23 billion valuation, led by the United Arab Emirates. Las Vegas is its only system carrying passengers. Work has begun in Nashville and a pilot is planned in Dubai.

• Space launch. SpaceX flew 165 orbital launches in 2025, all on Falcon 9. That was over half of the 320 launch attempts worldwide.
• Government. About one-fifth of SpaceX's 2025 revenue came from US government work. It flew 11 of 12 National Security Space Launch missions and all five US crew and cargo flights to the space station.
• Satellite internet. Starlink serves customers in 164 countries, territories and markets, the prospectus says (as of March 2026).
• Chips and AI compute. Terafab is a planned chip factory in Texas. Musk announced it on 21 March 2026, and Intel joined in April. Tesla and SpaceX said in August they would put about $16.8 billion into a first phase.

Timeline compiled from the sources linked in this article.

1. Tesla is a SpaceX shareholder. Tesla agreed to put $2 billion into xAI in January 2026. After the merger, that right turned into SpaceX shares. Tesla held 18,990,195 SpaceX Class A shares on 1 May 2026, under 1% of the total.
2. That stake already moves Tesla's profit. In Q3 2026 Tesla booked a $142 million unrealised loss on its SpaceX holding. "Unrealised" means a paper loss: the shares were not sold.
3. SpaceX buys Cybertrucks. The prospectus shows SpaceX spent $131 million on Tesla Cybertrucks in 2025. xAI bought $506 million of Tesla Megapack batteries.
4. The tunnel company builds for the rocket company. The same filing lists construction work by The Boring Company for SpaceX in Texas, without an amount.
5. SpaceX's 2025 revenue includes xAI and X. The $18.7 billion figure folds in their past results, so the government share would likely be higher without them.

The Musk group is no longer five separate stories. Shares, batteries, trucks, tunnels and chip plans now pass between the companies, and many of these links are written into SEC filings. That makes the group easier to read than before. It also means news at one company can show up in the accounts of another.

Related reading: Research archive.

Educational content. Not investment advice. Data Analytic Investments is not affiliated with Tesla, Inc., Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), xAI, X, Neuralink, The Boring Company, BYD or Intel; brand names are used for identification only. Illustrations marked "AI illustration" are not photographs.