By Akash Sriram
May 20 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s IPO filing revealed extensive commercial and financial ties among Elon Musk’s companies ranging from Cybertruck purchases and shared private jets to stock investments, showing how deeply intertwined his business empire has become ahead of what could become the largest IPO in history.
While many of the billionaire’s companies have long collaborated, the filing contains previously undisclosed details about how they now form a network bound by commercial agreements, financing obligations and operational dependencies spanning AI, transportation, communications and infrastructure.
The disclosures on Wednesday showed rapidly expanding transactions among SpaceX, electric vehicle maker Tesla, artificial intelligence company xAI and social network X ahead of a planned SpaceX IPO targeting a valuation of about $1.75 trillion.
SpaceX and its xAI subsidiary collectively bought about $650 million in goods and services from Tesla last year, including $506 million in Megapack battery systems purchased by xAI.
SpaceX spent $144 million on commercial goods and services, including $131 million on Tesla’s stainless-steel Cybertrucks at suggested retail prices, which would buy more than 1,000 of them.
Tesla, which has historically spent little on traditional advertising, also paid $4 million for advertisements on X in 2025, according to the filing.
The filing also disclosed aircraft-sharing arrangements involving Tesla and Musk personally, along with security payments to a private company owned by Musk.
It showed Tesla owns nearly 19 million shares of SpaceX Class A stock, representing less than 1% ownership after the offering, following a $2 billion investment in SpaceX earlier this year.
Tesla and SpaceX are also working on a multibillion-dollar joint project called the Terafab, a chip-manufacturing venture, highlighting how Musk’s companies are becoming increasingly interconnected around AI and compute infrastructure.
Tesla is building a solar factory to scale toward a 100-gigawatt-per-year domestic manufacturing target, aiming to supply custom photovoltaic hardware for SpaceX’s planned constellation of orbital AI data centers.
INVESTOR SCRUTINY
The disclosures come as investors increasingly scrutinize governance, capital allocation and the overlap among Musk-controlled companies as SpaceX expands beyond rockets and satellite internet into AI infrastructure and computing.
The filing revealed more than $20 billion in related-party AI infrastructure lease obligations tied to equipment agreements between subsidiaries linked to xAI and private investment firm Valor Equity Partners, whose founder Antonio Gracias sits on SpaceX’s board.
The filing said some of the Valor AI infrastructure lease transactions were treated as “failed sale-leaseback” arrangements, requiring SpaceX to record billions of dollars of associated obligations as debt on its balance sheet.
Valor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX said the payment and performance obligations under the agreements were guaranteed by SpaceX or one of its subsidiaries. The company disclosed it paid $885 million under the arrangements in 2025 and another $857 million in the first two months of 2026 alone.
The filing showed additional operational links across Musk-affiliated entities, including lease payments by xAI to Musk Industries LLC, a private company owned by Musk, and construction work by The Boring Company in Texas for SpaceX.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Henderson and Jamie Freed)
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