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Tesla retail holders send SpaceX merger petition to board, claiming 17.5 million shares
A shareholder letter due at Tesla's board on Monday asks for a vote on any SpaceX combination once terms are agreed, though its signers hold well under 1% of the stock.
HedgeWeekly News Desk ·
A group of Tesla retail shareholders plans to deliver a letter to the company's board on Monday, October 26, asking directors to put any combination with SpaceX to a shareholder vote as soon as terms are negotiated and documented. Organisers Alexandra Merz and Amy Steffens said that by Saturday evening 6,493 people had signed, reporting holdings of 17,528,859 shares that Steffens valued at about $6.5 billion. Signing closed on Sunday afternoon. The totals come from an online form and have not been independently verified.
The organisers describe the letter as a petition rather than an endorsement of a particular deal. It asks the special committee to take into account Tesla's all-time high share price, the ramp of its Cybercab and Optimus programmes and internal revenue projections. Even at the self-reported figure, the signers hold only a small fraction of Tesla's more than 3 billion shares outstanding. Neither company has commented.
The push follows SpaceX's third-quarter call on October 20, when Elon Musk said both companies had set up special committees of independent directors at shareholders' request. Asked whether a merger would be a good idea, he said yes, but added that the committees had not agreed terms and that treating a deal as certain would overstate it. Musk said he is conflicted and cannot join the committee talks. Yahoo Finance put SpaceX's market value at about $2.1 trillion and Tesla's at about $1.5 trillion as of October 21.
For investors, the hurdles matter more than the petition. Musk has said Tesla would need approval from 50% of all outstanding shares, not just those voted, and Steffens has noted that broker non-votes count against a deal, which raises the stakes of turnout among retail holders. Tesla's annual meeting on December 3 has no merger item on the ballot. Barclays analyst Dan Levy has said an announcement slipping into October or early November could make approval at that meeting harder, with a deal then more likely in six to 12 months. He estimates that an all-stock deal at recent values would give Musk about 37% of the combined company and about 56% of the vote, against roughly 20% of Tesla today. Prediction market Kalshi put the odds of a tie-up before next May at 59% on October 23.