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Elon Musk's floated merger of SpaceX and Tesla would do more than unite rockets and electric cars. It would fold two of the world's largest corporate Bitcoin stashes onto a single balance sheet.
Speaking on SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Musk said the boards of both companies had formed special committees of independent directors to weigh a tie-up, cautioning that treating a deal as "a certainty" would be "overstating it."
But the prospect alone has drawn fresh attention to the combined entity's crypto holdings.
Tesla reported 11,509 BTC in its most recent quarterly filing, while SpaceX disclosed 18,712 BTC in the S-1 it filed ahead of its June IPO. Together, that's 30,221 BTC, worth roughly $2.5 billion at Bitcoin's recent price near $83,000.
As Decrypt reported when the merger idea first surfaced, combining the two would stack one of the largest non-mining corporate Bitcoin positions anywhere under Musk's control, placing the merged company among the top handful of public holders, trailing only the likes of Michael Saylor's Strategy and a few others.
The SpaceX portion is the more striking piece. The rocket maker's 18,712 BTC was effectively invisible to public markets until its IPO filing, meaning a substantial treasury had quietly accumulated inside a private company for years before anyone could count it, more than double what blockchain trackers had previously attributed to SpaceX wallets. The combined cost basis across both firms sits around $1 billion, implying an average buy price near $35,000 per coin.
A merger wouldn't change anything about Bitcoin itself, and neither company has signaled plans to buy or sell. Both have held their positions static, with SpaceX last moving coins in prior years and Tesla reporting no changes.
Elon Musk's SpaceX Moves $133 Million Worth of Bitcoin
What a deal would alter is governance and accounting: one of the most closely watched corporate Bitcoin piles would sit inside a single public vehicle, subject to quarterly disclosures and the fair-value accounting that recently forced Tesla to book a loss as Bitcoin slid.
For now, the treasury math is hypothetical, living or dying with a transaction that remains exploratory. But it underscores how, almost incidentally, a Musk mega-merger would also create a Bitcoin giant.
