Skousen’s “Elon’s Missing Pieces”: A Real Battery Company Sold on a Merger Fantasy

The Hook

Mark Skousen, the economist behind the long-running “Forecasts & Strategies” letter at Skousen Wealth Network, has built this pitch around one of the loudest ideas in the market right now: that Tesla and SpaceX are going to merge. The promo opens with a kind of reluctant conviction. “I’m not one for hyperbole,” Skousen says, before immediately leaning into it. “But this could legitimately be the biggest stock story of all time. In short, I’m convinced that Tesla and SpaceX are headed for a historic merger.”

The urgency mechanism here is a supply-chain story. If a Tesla-SpaceX combination really happens, the argument goes, then the companies that supply the two giants become the “missing pieces” of a trade most investors have not found yet. Skousen teases three of those pieces: Amprius Technologies (AMPX), Aehr Test Systems (AEHR), and Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS). Two of those, AEHR and NVTS, we have already covered elsewhere on this site, so this teardown is scoped to the first and most heavily teased name, Amprius.

The pricing is worth stating up front because it frames everything else. The service is promoted at $2,995 a year, with a 90-day refund that carries a 10% “refund fee.” A reader who subscribes and wants out gets most, but not all, of their money back, a small but real asymmetry on top of a steep ticket.

The Big Claim

The core claim is the merger itself, and everything downstream hangs from it. Skousen is “convinced” Tesla and SpaceX are headed for a “historic merger,” and he frames that combination as “the biggest stock story of all time.” There is no announced deal behind that conviction, no filing, no board statement. The conviction is the product.

The specific stock claim is where Amprius enters. Skousen calls it “Missing Piece #1: The ‘ultimate prize’ of Batteries.” The pitch, in his words: “Its breakthrough battery stores more than TWICE the energy of the batteries SpaceX currently flies… A top Wall Street analyst called the technology the ‘ultimate prize’ of batteries… Revenue is growing more than 130% per year… yet the entire company is worth less than $2 billion.”

Strip the quote down and you get four distinct assertions. One, Amprius makes a battery with roughly double the energy density of what SpaceX flies today. Two, a Wall Street analyst called it the “ultimate prize.” Three, revenue is compounding at more than 130% a year. Four, the whole company still trades below $2 billion. Each of those can be checked, and checking them is where the interesting story actually lives, because Amprius is a real company with a real technology. The question is not whether the tech is real. The question is whether the merger narrative is doing honest work or just selling tickets.

The Mechanism

To understand what Amprius actually does, it helps to understand the battery problem it is trying to solve. Lithium-ion batteries have spent two decades improving mostly at the edges, because the dominant anode material, graphite, is close to its practical ceiling. An anode is the electrode where lithium ions collect when a battery charges, and graphite can only hold so many of them. Silicon can hold roughly ten times as many lithium ions by weight as graphite can, which is why a silicon anode can deliver dramatically more energy in the same size and weight. The catch has always been that silicon swells and cracks as it charges and discharges, which is why pure silicon anodes stayed in the lab for years.

Amprius’s technology, marketed under the SiCore and SiMaxwell brand families, is a serious attempt to commercialize that. The company builds high-energy-density cells aimed at exactly the applications where weight and volume matter most: drones, satellites, electric aviation, and defense. Those are not trivial customers. When every gram matters because a drone’s flight time or a satellite’s launch cost depends on it, a cell that packs more energy into less mass is worth paying for. The “ultimate prize” label is hype, but the underlying physics is real, and the analyst who used the phrase was not hallucinating: silicon anodes are widely understood across the industry to be the next real step in energy density.

The aerospace and drone battery market is where Amprius sells. This is a genuinely growing niche. Defense contractors and drone manufacturers are moving toward electric propulsion and longer mission endurance, and satellite operators want lighter power systems. Amprius has named customers in defense and drones, and its technology fits those needs directly. That is the legitimate spine of the story, and it exists entirely without any SpaceX merger.

Where the pitch drifts is the adjacency. Skousen wants the reader to imagine Amprius as a supplier into a combined Tesla-SpaceX, feeding batteries into Starlink satellites or the next rocket. The public record does not support that. SpaceX currently builds its own batteries for the Starlink constellation in-house. There is no confirmed SpaceX contract with Amprius, and the company’s disclosed customer base is defense contractors and drone makers, not SpaceX. The link is narrative, a case of two companies being near each other in the same industrial neighborhood rather than two companies doing business.

The Real Pick

Current price is as of the October 27, 2026 close, from Polygon.

Amprius carries a market cap of about $1.30 billion at these prices. The “less than $2 billion” line in the promo is technically still true, but it is worth noting how the stock got here: Amprius traded near a $2 billion market cap before selling off to roughly $1.2 billion, then ticking back up to around $1.3 billion. The tease price of $8.40 sits within a hair of the current $8.88, down 0.60%, essentially flat. There is no runaway move here, no sign that the market is pricing in a merger supply chain. The “missing piece” is trading like a company waiting on its own execution, not like a company about to be discovered.

Does the Math Check Out

Let us take the four assertions in order, because they do not all fail in the same way.

The “2X energy density” claim is real technology. Silicon-anode cells do deliver roughly double the energy density of conventional graphite-anode cells, and Amprius has published specs supporting specific cell formats. That does not guarantee profit, but the physics is legitimate and it is the strongest part of the whole pitch.

The “SpaceX adjacency” is where the math quietly breaks. The promo wants you to conclude that because Amprius makes high-energy batteries and SpaceX flies things that need batteries, Amprius must be a supplier into a combined Tesla-SpaceX. But SpaceX makes its own Starlink batteries, and there is no confirmed SpaceX contract in Amprius’s disclosures. Amprius sells to defense contractors and drone makers. That is a real business, but it is not the business the merger story implies. The adjacency is unconfirmed narrative dressed up as a supply-chain fact.

The “130% revenue growth” is real but off a tiny base. When a company is early in commercializing a new cell technology, triple-digit growth is the norm for the first few million dollars, not evidence of an impending inflection. The number is accurate and nearly meaningless as proof of scale.

The “worth less than $2 billion” line is true but tells the wrong story. A sub-$2 billion market cap is presented as the “undiscovered bargain” tell, when in fact the stock has already sold off from around $2 billion down to $1.2 billion. A falling market cap is not automatically a discount; sometimes it is the market correctly repricing a pre-profit, dilutive company.

And that is the part the promo never mentions. Amprius is not profitable, and it has been diluting shareholders to fund the long, expensive slog from lab breakthrough to commercial production. A shelf offering recently pressured the stock, which is part of why it fell from the $2 billion area. Silicon-anode technology is capital-intensive, and pre-profit, high-growth hardware companies fund themselves by issuing shares. That is normal and defensible, but it means the “entire company worth less than $2 billion” is not a store of hidden value sitting untouched; it is a company that has to keep asking the market for money.

Finally, the merger premise itself is speculative. No deal has been announced. Tesla and SpaceX are both controlled by Elon Musk and already share some operational DNA, so a merger is not impossible to imagine, but “convinced” is a long way from “announced,” and a $2,995 subscription built on a conviction with no filing behind it is built on a guess. If the merger never happens, the supply-chain story has no ceiling event, and the reader is left holding a battery stock on its own merits, which may be fine, but is not what they were sold.

The Verdict

Amprius is a legitimate technology bet worth understanding, and if you want exposure to the silicon-anode roadmap and the aerospace and drone battery market, it is a name worth studying on that basis. But do not buy it for the SpaceX-Tesla merger. The merger is speculative, the SpaceX adjacency is unconfirmed narrative, and the company is pre-profit and dilutive, which is a real risk profile that the promo simply does not mention. Buy Amprius, if you buy it at all, for the battery technology and the customers it already has, not for the “historic merger” it might someday feed. Skip the $2,995 ticket and do your own work on the silicon-anode story.

What They Got Right

• The silicon-anode technology is real, and the energy-density advantage over conventional graphite-anode cells is genuine and well documented across the industry, not invented for the pitch.
• The aerospace, drone, and satellite battery market is a real, growing niche where Amprius has named defense and drone customers, so the underlying business is not fiction.
• The revenue growth figure is accurate, Amprius really is compounding revenue at a triple-digit rate, even though the base it is growing from is small.
• Amprius is a real, exchange-listed company with a real market cap and real published specs, which puts this pitch in a different category from the “secret microcap” promos that reveal nothing checkable.
• Skousen is a legitimate, long-tenured economist and publisher, and the promo is transparent about its pricing and refund terms rather than burying them.

What They Got Wrong

• The SpaceX adjacency is unconfirmed narrative: SpaceX builds its own Starlink batteries in-house, and there is no confirmed SpaceX contract in Amprius’s disclosures, so the supply-chain link is implied rather than evidenced.
• The merger premise is speculative, with no announced deal or filing behind it, yet the entire pitch treats the “historic merger” as a near-certainty rather than a guess.
• The “worth less than $2 billion” framing hides the fact that the stock has already sold off from around $2 billion to $1.2 billion, so the “undiscovered bargain” framing is stale and the decline is not proof of a discount.
• The promo omits the dilution and pre-profit reality entirely: a recent shelf offering pressured the stock, and funding the commercialization requires ongoing share issuance, which is a material risk a subscriber deserves to hear.
• The “biggest stock story of all time” framing is hyperbole, an emotional multiplier rather than a checkable claim, and it sits uneasily next to a 10% “refund fee” on a $2,995 subscription that makes walking away cost real money.

Compliance Disclaimer

This is not financial advice. NewsletterVetter has no position in any stock mentioned.

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