Tesla did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“It’s sexy,” Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor and CEO of investment firm Gerber Kawasaki, told Fortune. “Everybody likes sexy things in the investment business.”
SpaceX being the new belle of the ball will only mount pressure on Tesla, according to Dave Mazza, CEO of Roundhill Investments. Investors bought into Tesla in part because of its ambitions around AI and robotics, and SpaceX’s success could undermine Tesla’s vision.
“Tesla’s valuation has never been justified by vehicles alone, and investors are paying for the autonomy and physical AI thesis,” Mazza told Fortune. “SpaceX’s IPO sharpens that scrutiny, because investors will now have a cleaner, purer Musk innovation bet to benchmark against, which raises the bar for Tesla to actually deliver.”
Mazza said this risk is present for all of Musk’s projects, however, and isn’t specific to SpaceX’s IPO. If you’re going to invest in a Musk-run company, you are buying with the understanding that he both brings value to the business, while also being largely responsible for its potential demise, he said.
“That concern is already priced in, as Musk’s divided attention has been a headline risk for years,” Mazza said. “The more relevant question is execution: Tesla needs to deliver on robotaxi and autonomy on its own timeline, and SpaceX going public doesn’t change that calculus one way or the other.”
“This period of time could be very difficult for Tesla, on top of the fact that now you’re throwing out SpaceX,” Gerber said. “In a typical Elon fashion, there’s lots of messiness with all this, and how that all gets reconciled is through a merger.”
