Who should judge a $3.5T merger when every judge already answers to the owner?
SpaceX and Tesla have handed a possible $3.5 trillion merger to committees of ‘independent’ directors, one of whom sits on both boards, while Elon Musk is recused but publicly calling the deal a good idea. When one person’s companies would combine AI models, robots, batteries and data centers, is board independence enough of a check, or does a concentration this large need a different kind of judge, and who should that be?
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In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, dated October 21, 2026, the hosts dug into Musk’s own description of the process as an ‘odd Kabuki dance’: two committees of independent directors, with Ira Ehrenpreis sitting on both boards and chairing the Tesla side, deciding whether the largest merger in history should happen. The episode’s angle is that the minds, bodies and terawatts the show is named for are being moved under one roof and one controlling shareholder, with the only gatekeepers being people who already answer to him. It also flags that SpaceX’s AI unit, largely a compute-rental business, just out-earned Starlink for the first time, which raises the question of whether the merged company would be a builder or a landlord. Listen to the full episode and tell us where you think the real check on this kind of concentration should sit.
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