Every so often, a corporate filing throws up a detail that says more about where a company is heading than any earnings call could. One such nugget emerged in last week's report from SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), revealing that Elon Musk's rocket company has quietly become a substantial customer of another business he runs, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA).
The numbers are eye-catching. In the second quarter alone, SpaceX purchased close to $300 million worth of Tesla's Megapack energy storage systems, the giant batteries used to store and manage electricity at scale. It has been snapping them up to power the enormous data centers behind its own artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions, and the pace of buying has accelerated sharply.
