To Elon Musk’s fanclub, there is nothing to see apart from more evidence of the great man’s visionary genius. There have been outside shareholders for years – in the UK, two popular investment trusts, Scottish Mortgage and Edinburgh Worldwide, have SpaceX as their largest holding. Musk’s strategic justification for combining SpaceX and xAI is that the AI battleground is about to shift to space. If xAI needs to use SpaceX’s rockets to establish orbital datacentres, business could be done at arm’s length on commercial terms. But the position is very different if, like the two UK investment trusts, your overwhelming exposure is to SpaceX (Baillie Gifford, manager of both trusts, declined to comment).

Source: The Guardian February 03, 2026 22:56 UTC