The Call After The Calls: SpaceX And Tesla

Elon Musk put a $1 trillion revenue number on SpaceX, and the sell side has been staring at its models ever since. "Roughly five times wrong relative to what Elon said 2028 revenue could be," says Alex Potter of Piper Sandler. "That's absurd."

ARK hosted the call after the calls: a live post-earnings breakdown of SpaceX and Tesla with buy side and sell side in the same room. Cathie Wood, Brett Winton, Tasha Keeney, Daniel Maguire and Sam Korus of ARK Invest are joined by Alex Potter of Piper Sandler, Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, and Aaron Burnett of Mach33.

The group works through the numbers that moved them most: 20 gigawatts of power and cooling lined up for terrestrial compute, one to two Starship launches per week, 2 million driverless miles in eight months, and a 75% full self-driving attach rate on new Tesla deliveries. They debate where the money for all of it comes from, why Pierre Ferragu believes the vision-only approach to autonomy has cleared proof of concept, how Starmind and orbital compute could change the cost curve, and whether the SpaceX and Tesla merger that Brett Winton puts at 90% odds within 18 months actually clears the Tesla shareholder base.

They close on the bear case. Debt markets, regulation, China, execution risk over decades, and the possibility that the merger never happens at all.