Elon Musk's $55 billion Texas chip factory, Terafab, is supposedly a joint venture between Tesla and SpaceX — but in reality, SpaceX is running the show. The project's overall lead, John Federspiel, also serves as Starlink's senior director of product engineering, and his team of 34 engineers and managers mostly come from Starship and Starlink. Tesla has almost no say: only two Tesla employees currently report to Federspiel (a chief engineer and a former Intel fab director), while the rest of the core team either have contracts with SpaceX or were poached from Intel and others. In other words, Tesla is pouring tens of billions into a project it can't control.
Musk has long blurred the lines between his companies. Tesla's AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy and vehicle software senior director Silvio Brugada both hold roles at xAI; materials engineering chief Charlie Kuehmann has held cross-company roles for over a decade. With SpaceX's valuation soaring to $2.25 trillion, the two nominally independent behemoths are now indistinguishable in assets, talent, and technology. Employees privately say a merger is only a matter of time.