Elon Musk says Tesla and SpaceX are officially exploring a world-historically ginormous merger. The move would focus Musk’s corporate power into one super-firm, and potentially function as a loophole that would earn him a pay package worth something in the neighborhood of $1 trillion. But an anonymously-sourced Bloomberg story claims that Musk, or someone involved in the merger, thinks the clock is ticking, and that Musk would need to finish merging these companies before the end of Donald Trump’s presidential term.

Tesla and SpaceX didn’t return Bloomberg’s requests for comment about this supposed timing issue. They also didn’t answer Gizmodo’s question on the same topic.

And it’s worth reading Bloomberg’s exact phrasing, which is a little on the opaque side:

“With Trump approaching the second half of his final term and jittery markets threatening the exuberance underpinning Musk’s empire, there’s a push to announce a deal by the first half of 2027 so that it closes during this administration, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Other than Democrats potentially doing things to markets that would put a damper on “exuberance”—with their Democrat-y vibes, I guess—it’s not clear what the snag would be. But one obvious issue that arises to block a merger is antitrust. Spacesla (or whatever it would be called) would combine two companies whose AI interests are already mingled. They’re both investors in the Terafab AI chip plant, an Tesla was an investor in xAI before it was owned by SpaceX . But does anyone consider the two companies to be AI competitors whose consolidation would give AI customers a bad deal?

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