For years, everyday investors and institutional heavyweights looking to buy into Elon Musk’s disruptive tech visions had exactly one liquid option: Tesla. SpaceX was firmly locked behind private markets, where it snagged a staggering $180 billion valuation last December. But that era of exclusivity is crashing to a halt. With SpaceX’s traditional IPO slated for June 12 on the NASDAQ, Wall Street is sweating the collateral damage. The fear is palpable that this massive new public player will siphon serious attention and fresh capital right out of the legacy EV maker. Tesla has long functioned as a proxy bet on Musk’s overarching genius, a dynamic that is now facing a structural earthquake.
The timing is incredibly tough for Tesla. While SpaceX essentially owns the private space sector with virtually zero real competition, Tesla is bleeding momentum. They’re getting hammered by cutthroat Chinese EV makers abroad and stubborn legacy gas guzzlers at home. Yet, Tesla’s P/E ratio is still sitting in the stratosphere, propped up almost entirely by promises of autonomous driving and robotics—markets that are getting crowded fast.
Analysts are already sounding the alarm on a fractured shareholder base. James Picariello over at BNP Paribas Exane recently warned clients that the SpaceX listing will inevitably split Musk’s dedicated retail investors, who currently hold a massive 44 percent of Tesla’s shares. Joe Gilbert at Integrity Asset Management echoed this, pointing out the obvious: Musk’s bandwidth is likely shifting toward the stars, which rarely spells good news for the car business. It’s gotten to the point where Nicholas Colas at DataTrek Research floated the idea of merging the two companies to consolidate the “Musk premium,” pointing to the old SolarCity bailout as a historical blueprint.
Getting to this June listing wasn’t without its weird detours, either. Back in December 2025, hedge fund heavyweight Bill Ackman pitched taking SpaceX public via a SPARC on X. Unlike a traditional SPAC, investors wouldn’t front the cash until a target was locked in. Musk shut that down instantly with a flat “No,” locking in next month’s standard offering. The battle lines for investor capital are officially drawn.
So what is Tesla doing while investors eye the exits for a pure-play space stock? Doubling down on the exact autonomy narrative keeping its valuation afloat. Production of the highly anticipated Cybercab just kicked off last month in April 2026 at Giga Texas, and its hardware efficiency is honestly off the charts. According to EPA certifications confirmed by VP Lars Moravy, the vehicle pulls an absurd 10.3 kWh per 100 kilometers. To put that in perspective, the Lucid Air Pure manages 14.3 kWh, and a Model 3 or Model Y sits around 14.9. Nothing else on the road even comes close.
You can’t really compare it to a family daily driver, though. The Cybercab ditches the steering wheel, pedals, and rear seats entirely to create a teardrop-shaped pod built for two. By stripping out the conventional interior and keeping the battery under 50 kWh, it still manages to squeeze out nearly 500 kilometers of range.
When you run the math for a massive robotaxi fleet, the margins get wild. Assuming an average US electricity rate of roughly 16 cents a kilowatt-hour, the Cybercab costs about 2.6 cents a mile to run. Compare that to 3.8 cents for a Model 3 or nearly 4.8 cents for an Ioniq 5. If a fleet is churning out hundreds of thousands of miles a year, those pennies compound into massive operational savings.
But here is the elephant in the room. The hardware might be a marvel of hyper-efficiency, but the entire blueprint relies on software that still isn’t fully baked. Tesla’s currently supervised robotaxi service is logging an accident rate roughly four times higher than your average human driver. Investors now have to make a choice: stick around for Tesla’s messy, high-stakes software rollout, or pivot their cash into SpaceX’s orbital monopoly.