“SpaceX Has To Buy It. Period. End Of Story.” Cramer’s Answer For Tesla, Down 19.97% This Year.

“SpaceX Has To Buy It. Period. End Of Story.” Cramer’s Answer For Tesla, Down 19.97% This Year.

AJ Tiarsmith

Tue, September 15, 2026 at 8:16 PM GMT+3 5 min read

• TSLA -0.35%

Quick Read

• Cramer says SpaceX should buy TSLA, which trades near $360, down 20% year to date, with a P/E around 374.

• Tesla's Q2 free cash flow swung to -$1.09B as capex surged 142% year over year, funding AI and Robotaxi spending.

• Musk acknowledged growing Tesla-SpaceX overlap on the Q2 earnings call but declined to discuss a combination, while Tesla holds $2B in SpaceX preferred stock.

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Jim Cramer offered a short answer for what to do about Tesla on Monday night, and the direction of the deal he suggested is the interesting part. Most chatter about the Musk empire assumes Tesla is the acquirer, or that some merger of equals stitches the parts together. Cramer flipped it: "Tesla... It's at 358, according to CNBC. My only solution to it is that Space X has to buy it. Period. End of story."

Read that again. The trillion-dollar automaker with the AI ambitions is the target in Cramer's framing. The privately held rocket company is the buyer.

Price Reality, Properly Dated

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) closed at $358.97 on September 14, 2026, which lines up with Cramer's 358 reference on the day he spoke. As of 12:45 PM ET on September 15, 2026, the stock is at $359.93, up 0.27% on the session. Year to date, Tesla is down 19.97%.

The multiple has not budged in sympathy. Tesla still trades at a P/E of roughly 374 and a P/FCF of about 227.9, with an operating margin of 4.6% and a market cap near $1.42T. That is the setup Cramer is reacting to: a heavy AI, robotics and Robotaxi spending cycle running through the P&L while the automotive business absorbs the drag.

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The most recent quarter shows why. In Q2 FY2026, Tesla posted revenue of $28.24B, but operating income fell to $398M, operating margin compressed to 1.4%, and free cash flow swung to -$1.09B as capex jumped 141.8% year over year (see the Q2 8-K exhibit). Deliveries were a record at 480,126 vehicles, and active FSD subscriptions reached 1.48M, but the spending is the story.

Musk Has Already Been Asked

Cramer's framing has a precedent on the record. On July 22, 2026, on Tesla's second-quarter earnings call, Colin of Wells Fargo asked the question directly, framing it around the growing SpaceX collaborations and whether a combination made sense over time.

Here is Elon Musk's answer, verbatim: "As you can tell from the many collaborations on so many fronts with SpaceX, there's more and more overlap. Especially with TeraFab, that's really going to be a gigantic project. But obviously, we can't talk about combining companies and that kind of thing, according to Tesla. On an engineering school, it's got to be done with the appropriate process."

He acknowledged growing overlap and declined to discuss a combination. He left the door open. Note also that earlier this year, Tesla made a $2B investment in SpaceX Series E Preferred Stock and announced a SpaceX partnership to build what Musk has called the largest chip fab, TeraFab, for vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing. The plumbing between the two companies keeps getting thicker.

What Would Actually Have to Happen

Cramer's solution is one sentence. Turning it into a transaction is not. A few open questions frame the gap:

• Who values whom? Tesla is a public, roughly $1.42T equity, and Musk himself is the CEO of both sides.

• What happens to the Musk cross-holdings, including Tesla's SpaceX preferred stake and the framework agreement covering TeraFab and Digital Optimus?

• How would a Tesla board run a process that clears the conflicts inherent in a same-CEO deal?

None of this is sourced here as a plan, and Musk has not commented on the merger question since July. Traders are watching anyway. Polymarket has run active contracts on when a Tesla and SpaceX combination might be announced (see our prior coverage of the prediction-market pricing) with odds that have swung meaningfully in recent weeks.

Cramer's line was blunt. The unresolved question underneath it is whether the busiest CEO in the market wants to run the deal in the direction Cramer says it has to go.

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