In Part I of Elon’s Endgame, I laid out Musk’s updated master plan, how the roadmap recently changed, and how the empire’s pieces fit together.
The quick summary: We shouldn’t look at Elon’s empire like it’s a collection of separate companies. We should view it as a vertically integrated stack where AI, energy, robotics, connectivity, and space logistics & infrastructure reinforce each other. Mars colonization remains the North Star, but the near-term roadmap has pivoted to the Moon as the proving ground and steppingstone and to orbital AI data centers as the next compute frontier.
You don’t have to believe Mars will be colonized on any particular timeline to profit. You don’t even have to own stock in Tesla or SpaceX—though both will be core holdings for many.
What matters is mapping capital flows because Musk’s vision is directing hundreds of billions of dollars today, and potentially trillions more over the next decade. If you understand where all that money is going, who is likely to benefit across supply chains, adjacent technologies, and supporting infrastructure, and how the timelines stack up, you can better position yourself to profit from one of the most important structural investment themes of the next decade.
Meanwhile, the numbers have grown even larger just this week with Tesla’s earnings call and a big announcement from SpaceX.
On April 22, Tesla raised its 2026 capex guidance to more than $25 billion—about 3X 2025 levels. CFO Vaibhav Taneja confirmed Tesla will run negative free cash flow for at least the rest of 2026 as Musk doubles down on his “build what you need” playbook.
All that money is going to six factories, AI compute infrastructure, scaling up Optimus humanoid robot production, initial production of the Cybercab robotaxi and Semi electric truck, increasing battery pack capacity, initial production of Megapack 3, and building the research/pilot fab for the new Terafab semiconductor initiative.
In other words, Tesla is pouring money into every layer of the stack we talked about in Part I simultaneously.
Then there’s SpaceX…
Remember, SpaceX recently filed for what will be history’s biggest IPO by far—raising up to $75 billion at up to a $2 trillion valuation—in June. (But I wouldn’t be surprised to see that expected date get pushed back a bit.) Musk will retain super-voting control through a dual class share structure.
SpaceX dropped another bomb this week, announcing it’s secured the rights to buy leading AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year. If SpaceX decides not to buy Cursor, it will pay the company $10 billion for their collaborative work to develop the most advanced coding and knowledge-work AI models.
The deal—like the recent acquisition of xAI—is another step toward turning SpaceX into a full-stack AI company. You’ve got the compute coming from Colossus, the Grok foundation models, and now Cursor—already used by two-thirds of the Fortune 500—providing the application layer into the software developer world. The deal also removes Cursor from the chess board so OpenAI or Anthropic can’t buy it, and sets up SpaceX for the future monetization of Colossus.
Put simply, Musk’s ecosystem is in the early innings of a multi-hundred-billion-dollar capex cycle that will accelerate over the coming years. And this investment will create demand shock waves that ripple throughout the economy and benefit various suppliers and partners.
So there’s a big set of opportunities lining up—even for investors who don’t want direct exposure to Musk’s ecosystem through Tesla and/or SpaceX.
Which brings us to the framework…
Here’s what to look for in the near- and medium-term (1 to 5 years):
AI infrastructure buildout
Every dollar Musk spends on xAI’s Colossus expansion, every new Optimus robot, every Cybercab/robotaxi, every chip Terafab eventually produces, every satellite with onboard compute, and now every training run Cursor executes on Colossus—all of it feeds the broader AI infrastructure buildout.
That means more GPUs, more custom ASICs, more memory, more networking gear, more high-speed interconnects, more power, more cooling, more process chemicals, and more semiconductor capital equipment to build, measure, test, and package chips.
Tesla Energy’s inflection
Energy storage is no longer a side business. It deployed 8.8 GWh in Q1 2026. With Megapack 3 production ramping this year and virtual power plants scaling, watch the full battery supply chain—lithium, nickel, graphite, anode/cathode materials, and cell manufacturers that can meet Tesla’s volume and domestic-content requirements.
Grid operators and utilities adopting large-scale storage for AI-driven load growth represent another layer.
And Tesla Energy’s virtual power plant model—aggregating millions of home and grid batteries—could become a massive resource that reshapes utility economics and creates opportunities for software platforms able to optimize distributed energy.
SpaceX IPO ripple effects
Even if you never buy a single share of SpaceX itself, a successful IPO will flood the narrative with attention, validation, and capital—repricing the entire space sector in the process from pure-plays to secondary beneficiaries supplying things like launch components, satellite hardware, and ground infrastructure.
In other words, the whole space ecosystem stands to benefit from the halo effect and contract flow stemming from the SpaceX IPO.
Robotaxi rollout
Tesla expanded its unsupervised robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston just last week. And its FSD (full self-driving) tech reached 1.28 million subscribers in Q1. As these things scale, Tesla is not the only beneficiary. Opportunities unfurl in adjacent areas like fleet management tech, insurance innovation, and complementary sensors. The shift to mobility-as-a-service also reshapes auto-adjacent financing and servicing models.
Optimus scaling
As Optimus production scales and we start to see deployments in factories and residences, the robotics component supply chain will catch fire—actuators, precision motors, force-torque sensors, harmonic drives, camera systems, sensor suites, edge-AI chips, and contract manufacturing all benefit.
Here’s what to look for in the long-term (5 to 10+ years):
Now we get more speculative. But the capital flows here could generate some of the biggest long-term gains if the thesis plays out.
The lunar economy
Regular Starship launches to support the Moon-based “self-growing city” Musk pivoted to in February open an entirely new supply chain around the lunar economy and logistics. Investable sub-themes include life-support systems, radiation shielding, habitat tech, in-situ resource utilization, lunar communication constellations and relays, power generation/storage for low-gravity environments, and robotics tailored for vacuum/thermal extremes.
Almost none of this is investable in pure-play form today, but the companies building toward it will start to emerge over the next few years.
Optimus at civilization scale
If/when general-purpose humanoid robots scale into the millions and eventually billions of units, they’ll reshape the economics of manufacturing, construction, elder care, and off-world operations. The companies that supply and maintain these robots and their components and systems will grow like crazy. So will the companies insuring this new “robot labor force.”
Mars as an investment theme
Mars as an actual investment theme will still be speculative in 10 years, but successful lunar operations de-risk the next step. Early Mars-oriented infrastructure, propellant production, and habitat tech could begin showing up in public company roadmaps.
Wrapping up…
You don’t need to be a Musk fanboy—or even bullish on Mars—to see what’s happening and position yourself to benefit.
You just need to recognize that when one person has the means and vision to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars in capital across interlocking verticals it will create many winners—a big chunk of which will be outside the Musk companies themselves.
Most investors still analyze each Musk company in isolation. But it’s the investors who see and understand the system—the deliberate flywheels that turn one success into accelerated progress across the board—map the capital flows, and monitor the supply chains that will achieve the biggest gains from one of the most important structural investment themes of the next decade.
That’s the framework. In Part III, I’ll get very specific: a rundown of 25 stocks I think are extremely well positioned to benefit from Elon’s endgame—some through direct partnerships or supplier relationships, others through powerful second-order effects.
Related: Elon Musk’s Endgame Is Bigger Than Mars—and It’s Already in Motion