‘Tap dancing through a minefield’: Elon Musk’s $3.5 trillion Tesla-SpaceX merger talks expose his power—and scant accountability

Elon Musk said Tuesday that independent directors at Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to explore combining the two companies—a deal that, at current market values, would create a roughly $3.5 trillion giant.

Musk said he can’t take part in the talks because he is a “conflicted party.” “This is definitely the kind of question where I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield,” Musk said on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call , adding that it would be “overstating it” to call a merger a certainty.

The talks put a fresh spotlight on a question that has followed Musk since SpaceX’s June IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire, at least on paper: When one person holds this much wealth and controls this many companies, who holds him accountable? A trillion-dollar fortune, on paper SpaceX priced its shares at $135 and began trading under the ticker SPCX on June 12.

The stock closed its first day at $161.11 , up nearly 20%, and the company’s market value topped $2 trillion during the session.

According to SpaceX’s IPO filing, Musk held about 4.8 billion shares plus 350 million options exercisable at $8.39 each—enough to push his net worth past $1 trillion at the offering price, CBS News reported .

That status has proved fragile.

Musk has since called himself a “former trillionaire,” and his fortune has hovered around the line.

Forbes said he regained trillionaire status on Oct.

9 , then pegged his net worth at $977.2 billion on Oct.

13 after SpaceX shares slid.

Much of that wealth is also tied up in stock he can’t sell for a year under the IPO lockup.

Even so, the scale is hard to overstate.

Only 19 countries have a GDP above $1 trillion, according to World Bank data cited by CBS.

Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s senior director of economic justice, said Musk’s fortune represents a “new Gilded Age” of wealth inequality.