Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.

The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.

And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.

The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.

The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.

“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.

For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.

Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.

SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.

Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.

Blurred lines

The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.

In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.

The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.

Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.

Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.

It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.

The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.

“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”

On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.

Musk at the wheel

For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.

Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.

The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.

As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.

As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.

The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.

If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.

America’s nurses are more educated than ever and can command six-figure salaries. Most have their bachelor’s degree. Their income has boomed since the pandemic to a median $97,550 a year, and their hands-on work isn’t easily automated away. Nursing schools have seen their ranks swell, minting thousands of new graduates every year.

They’re also leaving the bedside in droves. Burnout and complaints about understaffing, verbal abuse and workplace violence are pushing many nurses off the front lines and into other careers where their skills are in high demand.

“There is no shortage of nurses in this country,” said Jeff Doucette, chief nursing officer at healthcare analytics firm Press Ganey. “There’s a shortage of nurses that want to work in the current environment.”

Fifteen years ago, bedside registered nurses had an 11% turnover rate, according to data from NSI Nursing Solutions, a nurse-placement firm. The percentage of nurses leaving their jobs every year began to tick up even before Covid, when it spiked further. In the pandemic’s aftermath, as more hospitals dangled salary increases, turnover eased. But last year, it rose again, hitting 18%.

One 2024 survey of 800,000 nurses found that roughly 40% said they planned to leave the workforce or retire in the next five years, with many citing stress, burnout and understaffing. In another survey this year, 43% said they were likely to leave bedside roles within the next year, up from 38% the prior year.

A recent University of Pennsylvania survey of 4,000 actively licensed nurses who’d left a job in the past five years found that while 56% are retired, 8% are working in other fields and the rest weren’t working.

The revolving door is driving up expenses for hospitals that spend millions to recruit staff and fill gaps, and increasing costs for patients.

Health executives say worker churn also jeopardizes patient safety, intensifying the risk of patient falls, medical errors and missed cues. Senior nurses, in particular, bring vast stores of clinical intuition and operational expertise that help ensure unit safety, mentor less-experienced staff and keep complex hospital floors running efficiently.

A decade ago when managing emergency departments, Dustin Bass said he was accustomed to tapping his most tenured nurses to run triage. With a decade or two on the job, they could look across a room and spot who was having a heart attack.

“Now you have nurses running massive emergency rooms with 133 care spaces, and they’ve only been working for two or three years,” said Bass, president of the Emergency Nurses Association.

Strained staff, rising violence

The American hospital system has grown more efficient, both in terms of footprint and staffing. There are fewer hospital beds, and the ones that remain are occupied on a more continuous basis. Hospitals have adopted software tools to optimize staffing, with nurses more regularly covering shifts on floors where they aren’t usually assigned, to meet patient ebbs and flows.

It’s a boon for productivity, health executives say. It’s also a considerable strain on workers, whose days are more intense and less predictable.

A generation ago, nurses might have worked in a ward of patients recovering from routine surgeries. Today, more patients are seen outpatient, and those who remain tend to be sicker and more medically complex, requiring intensive monitoring. With the growth of clinical testing, nurses are also coordinating care with a bevy of specialists and inputting electronic health records—often on 12-hour shifts with no more than a 30-minute break.

And they’re bearing the brunt of the system’s strains. Fewer hospital beds can jam up emergency departments with patients—some who grow irate waiting for beds. Many hospital emergency departments, meanwhile, have become catch basins for people with unmet mental-health challenges in full-blown crises.

Across all floors, nurses describe a coarsening in attitudes among patients that often leads to friction, if not outright violence.

“The nurse is the face of the hospital, and we’re constantly blamed for things outside our control,” said Juliet Etienne, 29.

Since starting a job as an emergency department nurse in New Orleans last year, she’s been kicked and spat on and had a patient throw a full dinner tray at her. Still, she said she can understand why emergency patients sometimes boil over. On occasion, she’s seen them wait more than 30 hours for care.

An analysis of records from 1,500 hospitals by the University of Michigan Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found ER wait times spiked during the pandemic and stayed high through 2024, the most recent data available. During the winter months, when hospitals are busiest, nearly 5% of patients wait over 24 hours for a hospital bed.

“You have people in their most vulnerable times of their life, and their call button’s not getting answered because the nurse is overworked, their loved one’s not being seen,” said Amy Stimpfel, associate professor at Villanova University’s M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing. “It’s bubbling up from a system that’s sort of broken.”

Press Ganey, which compiles reports from a large national hospital sample, found 2.4% of nursing staff were attacked in some manner last year. The rate is up 26% from 2017, the furthest back the survey data go, and amounts to well over 1,000 attacks a month.

This is likely an undercount, since many incidents are never reported, the company said. Assaults can run the gamut from common problems like getting shoved to, in rarer cases, severe attacks such as stabbings.

Surveys by nursing associations and unions peg rates significantly higher: A recent survey of 1,300 nurses by National Nurses United found 33% said they’d been slapped, punched or kicked in the past year, with another 12% reporting being groped or inappropriately touched.

Almost two out of five healthcare workers have considered leaving their jobs because of safety concerns, according to a Harris Poll survey last year commissioned by Verkada, a security-tech firm.

Holly Jazwinski, a 42-year-old emergency-room nurse in Danville, Pa., said she loves bedside nursing. But last summer, a patient punched her in the face, broke her glasses and attempted to stab her with them.

“Now I have this sense of anxiety every time I go to work,” Jazwinski said. “I started to feel a little defeated, like what am I even doing here?”

She’s currently getting her master’s in nursing, which will allow her to pursue other jobs, including in education.

Today’s bedside nurses have more career options than previous generations—an advantage for workers and a challenge for hospitals trying to keep them on the front lines.

Nurse practitioner roles, which require more advanced training and offer more pay, are mushrooming as more states have given them license to independently practice. Careers in virtual nursing and settings like urgent care are also growing.

One of its nurses recently quit to become a nurse practitioner, offering cosmetic treatments that patients often pay for in cash. “I can’t compete with that,” said Connolly.

The system is partnering with a local university to conduct research on why young nurses are leaving the profession early.

Christian Stone, a nurse in Washington, D.C., spent five years working in different emergency departments before leaving to join an urgent-care clinic. He said he wanted to help people and loved the department’s tempo, but he was routinely the target of screaming patients. One man bit him.

Wait times were often long and tempers short, he said, as patients without primary care showed up seeking help for minor ailments.

“I do miss it,” Stone said of bedside nursing. “But now I don’t hate coming to work every day.”

An expensive loss

Part of the challenge in fighting turnover is that, on a spreadsheet, nurses can look like a costly line item, said Omid Razmpour, a former ICU nurse and a researcher at Emory University. And many hospitals already face severe financial pressure, including higher operational costs and rising ranks of uninsured patients who still require care.

Nursing unions often complain that management staffing and pay decisions are driving nurses off the front lines.

“If you talk to the C Suite, it’s easy to say, ‘Hey, give us resources for a physician,’ because they’re going to generate X amount of revenue,” Razmpour said.

But losing a nurse is extremely expensive. Razmpour analyzed turnover costs at Emory Healthcare and found it costs the Atlanta-based health system around $78,000 anytime a nurse leaves. Costs can pile up as hospitals fill gaps with more expensive, often contract, workers and try to recruit and train full-time replacements, he’s found.

Emory recently gave out $150 million in raises to its staff, mostly nurses. The effort cut turnover rates and ultimately saved the system money, said Sharon Pappas, who recently retired as chief nurse executive at Emory Healthcare and worked with Razmpour to analyze the cost of the system’s nursing turnover.

Some hospitals have fewer resources and big problems.

Rome Health, a safety-net hospital in upstate New York that serves many elderly and uninsured patients, has struggled with high nurse turnover for years, with 50% of its staff leaving every year as of 2019.

The problem persisted during the pandemic and its aftermath, as some nurses left for more lucrative careers such as travel nursing or work as nurse practitioners, at times because they felt overwhelmed or fed up, said Ashley Edwards, the health system’s chief nursing officer.

For help, the hospital appealed in 2024 to the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, last year winning a $5 million grant to help invest in its nursing workforce. It’s since used the money to support a residency program for new nurses and a coach who regularly meets one-on-one with nurses.

In one meeting with the foundation, Edwards recalled being asked how staff intended to carry out such programs, given the work they’d entail. “We were like, ‘We can’t afford not to,’” Edwards said. “It’s exhausting to the nurses to have that much turnover, not knowing what their day looks like. Are they going to come in three nurses short? Are they going to come in fully staffed? Are they going to come in with all new nurses?”

Rome Health still has a high turnover rate—28% as of last year—but the hospital said lowering that number is yielding results. Rates of falls and certain IV-associated infections have both declined.

Some hospitals have also boosted safety protocols to deal with the risk of serious violence. In some cases this means panic buttons and armed private security forces. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has added metal detectors across its 40 hospitals after a gunman shot multiple healthcare workers at its York, Pa., campus last year after a loved one died there.

“Everyone in the country is trying to roll these out as best and fast as they can,” said Maribeth McLaughlin, UPMC’s chief nurse executive.

Nurses say the safety measures are helpful but should be seen as one part of a tool kit, which also involves things like unit-specific safety plans and adequate staffing.

Campbell, the Florida nurse who was strangled, voted with fellow nurses last year to unionize over issues including safety and what they say is patient overcrowding. She’s currently serving as a nurse delegate in contract negotiations with the hospital, an HCA Healthcare facility. The company said workplace safety was a serious issue and that it is investing in security, technology and training to ensure the safety of its workers and patients.

Campbell is planning on returning to the emergency department later this year. While she has some trepidation, Campbell said she wants to keep caring for patients, as well as advocate for change and better safety.

“Everyone has a mom or dad or child they feel passionate about caring for,” she said. “I want to stay in the game.”

At the center of this expansion has been a strategy to tap in to people’s interests and hobbies—the Danish toy-brick maker calls them “passions”—many of which cross demographic boundaries. These include personal preoccupations like bonsai trees and golden retrievers, celebrities such as pop star Olivia Rodrigo and mega events like Formula One and the World Cup.

That has led to new types of building sets, including more sophisticated models that adults can display on their coffee tables, and a shift in marketing strategy, with Lego pouring money into experiences and social-media skits aimed at fans.

For Formula One watchers, Lego built life-size, drivable replicas of the teams’ race cars, which drivers took around the circuit at last year’s Miami Grand Prix. To reach gaming fans, Lego in August showed up at the Gamescom trade event in Cologne, Germany, with a giant Minecraft Lego chicken that visitors could sit on.

“We go not just for the people who are there, but because the types of things that we create become big social-media engagement,” says Julia Goldin, Lego’s chief product and marketing officer.

The strategy has helped spur growth. In the first half of this year, privately held Lego’s revenue rose 21% from the year-earlier period to a record 41.9 billion Danish kroner ($6.27 billion), while net profit climbed 32% to 8.6 billion kroner.

The Wall Street Journal spoke to Goldin about how the company researches people’s passions and turns these into products and marketing campaigns.

Edited excerpts follow:

Beyond demographics

WSJ: Adults have become a big focus for Lego—what’s behind that?

JULIA GOLDIN: Over the past eight years, we said there was a bigger opportunity with adults—not just people who are super-high-affinity fans, but people who maybe built a long time ago or had never built with bricks before—by giving them the things they would love to build now.

We approached adults from a passion-point perspective from the very beginning. We said we need to understand what they’re into. So, we looked at men, we looked at women, we looked at what their big interests were, what types of things they like to collect, what types of things they wanted to display in their rooms, etc. Now you can put Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” on your wall, or if you’re into animals, some cute floating sea otters. And then gamers who love a bit of ’80s or ’90s nostalgia can build and display the Game Boy.

We are now seeing strong growth with both adults and kids.

WSJ: How do you find out about people’s interests?

GOLDIN: We do a lot of trend-seeking and social listening. We look at viewership of various programs, behaviors, what’s trending socially. Then we dive quite deeply into these interests through primary research, ethnographic research and interviews.

AI has helped us ramp this up. There are tools where you can ask, with the right prompts: “People who are passionate about F1, what are they talking about? What are the latest conversations on Reddit?”

WSJ: Lego flower bouquets and trees are among the company’s most popular sets. How and when did that come about?

GOLDIN: When we started to talk seriously about adults, we could see that some people were into gardening and flowers. We launched the first flower bouquet in 2021 and completely underestimated how successful it would be. We started with the 18-plus age group because we thought that’s where the sweet spot is. But we realized that younger girls, especially teens, really love to build Lego flowers so we expanded the range.

You might think botanicals are women and F1 cars are men. But that’s why we talk about interests and not just gender and demographics. Yes, botanicals have a huge following among women and teenage girls, but bonsai trees are one of the top 10 products for men and teen boys. Speed Champions F1 cars show up in the top 10 for teen girls. I thought most of Olivia Rodrigo’s following would be girls, but my 16-year-old son asked me for two sets because his friends are massively into her.

That’s why we don’t market to a demographic. You can never be assumptive about how that breaks down in terms of gender.

WSJ: How has this shift in thinking changed your products and marketing?

GOLDIN: F1 is a great example. In the past, we might have started with a partnership with a team and a great Lego car for people to build. But we understand that it’s a multigenerational passion and different people are in it for different things. Some people love the cars, some collect, some follow the actual sport of racing, and some have tremendous passion for the drivers and their teams. That is why our F1 portfolio spans everything from Duplo [bricks] for toddlers to detailed display models and driver helmets for older fans.

But then we ask ourselves: What can we do to go beyond the products, to give fans Lego brand experiences that they would never expect? That’s why in Miami last year we built 10 full-size Lego Formula One cars, with nearly 400,000 bricks in each, and put all 20 drivers in them for the driver’s parade. Everyone assumed they were static models, until the drivers started lapping the circuit and we saw a tremendous amount of excitement and social media buzz. We generated something like two, three billion views.

WSJ: Do social-media views of a marketing event translate into significant sales of Lego sets tied to these campaigns?

GOLDIN: Yeah, of course. We don’t share data, but I can tell you they’re some of our most successful products.

‘She Built That’

WSJ: You say Lego is growing particularly strongly with girls. What is driving that?

GOLDIN: We used to have only Lego Friends as the one big line for girls, and some Disney products like “Frozen.” But rather than looking at toy categories that were selling to girls, like dolls, and trying to replicate that, we really worked to understand what girls are into.

We realized girls are super into pets and creatures, nature and flowers, socializing and music. We expanded significantly around those areas with botanicals, animals, K-pop and Olivia Rodrigo.

We also did the “She Built That” campaign, very strongly saying girls can build just as well as boys. I’ve heard for a long time that “girls don’t like to build because moms don’t,” but that’s just not true. We’re showing them things they really love to build, and that’s why it works.

WSJ: Why do you think adults, teens and others are turning to Lego more nowadays?

GOLDIN: There’s an overriding sense of lack of purposefulness and this drowning in content that you’re constantly being fed. Three hours have gone by and you’ve just been scrolling through feeds of reels. People are getting really tired. They want to actively do something that’s more purposeful and lasting.

When they build with Lego sets, they say they feel creative. They want to do something they can be proud of—where they can say, “Wow, I did this.”

The iPhone-maker’s shares closed at a record, just enough to push the company’s market capitalization into territory that only chip colossus Nvidia occupies. Apple’s market value has surpassed $5 trillion six times previously during intraday trading, but it had never closed above that level, which it squeaked past on Wednesday, ending the day at $5.005 trillion according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Cook’s act will be tough to follow. During his 15-year tenure as CEO, which ended Aug. 31, Apple’s market capitalization multiplied by a factor of 13. He nearly quadrupled the number of iPhones sold annually. He grew its highly profitable services business from $10 billion annually to more than $100 billion. He launched the Apple Watch and AirPods, which together generate more than $30 billion a year. He poured Apple’s cash into more than $1 trillion worth of share buybacks and dividends.

Today, Apple shares trade at a premium compared with the overall S&P 500 even though the company’s revenue growth rate is slower than the index’s average. That is because the company’s shares are viewed as safe, and its business predictable, say analysts.

A key to Apple’s success under Cook is how it has limited capital spending, juicing the company’s returns for investors and greatly reducing the risks of its business. That has never been more apparent than during the AI build-out, when big tech rivals have rushed to spend gargantuan sums on data centers while Apple has focused on its core businesses making devices and selling high-margin services for them.

Apple investors are so confident in its business that they have driven up its shares despite big cost increases that threaten profit margins. The cost of memory and storage chips inside iPhones, Macs and iPads has skyrocketed as demand for those chips from data centers has led to shortages. Apple has responded by raising prices across its device lineup, including for older model iPhones that would typically get a price cut.

In theory, such a move could hurt Apple since iPhone buyers might wait longer to upgrade their devices. Yet since the first wave of price increases Apple shares have jumped 25%.

In part, that is because investors think Apple device buyers will pay the higher prices, enabling Apple to generate as much or more in total profits even if margins are down, said Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan. He added that Apple’s new foldable iPhone Duo is likely to be popular and that the new Siri AI will prompt iPhone upgrades.

AI has long been viewed as Apple’s Achilles’ heel. The company failed in its efforts to build its own frontier model, and it also allowed its Siri assistant to fall far behind rivals. ChatGPT revolutionized what smartphone users expect from chatbots.

Apple hopes to turn a corner with the new Siri AI. Built with Google’s help, Apple’s redesigned chatbot was released this fall. It still lags behind rival AI systems in key respects, though it has the advantage of being built directly into the device that many people already use, their iPhone. Apple also has access to more personal data, which could theoretically be used for compelling AI features, though new AI agents show the technology is advancing faster than Apple’s ability to keep up.

Tech rivals know how important it is to control the devices that people use to deliver their services. Perhaps most threatening to Apple, OpenAI is planning a family of AI-powered devices. It has poached hundreds of Apple employees to drive its device strategy. Apple responded in July by suing OpenAI, alleging it stole Apple trade secrets.

OpenAI has said it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit” and alleged in a new legal filing Wednesday that Apple poached one of its own employees who took confidential files with him. Apple said in response that it had found no evidence supporting the new allegation.

AI could be the battleground where Ternus makes his mark, either ushering in a new era of innovation and growth for Apple or finally losing its status as the company that has defined how people interact with computers.

Airbnb, though, has a real chance to emerge as a winner from the upheaval. The catch: Its stock already reflects above-industry growth. To justify its valuation, Airbnb will need to turn repeat customers into loyal ones.

Online travel companies make much of their money by simplifying search and collecting fees on bookings. AI agents threaten that model.

But not all travel marketplaces are equally exposed. Booking and Expedia largely sell hotel rooms that travelers can also book directly or through competing sites. If an agent can find the same room elsewhere, it has little reason to favor either Booking or Expedia.

Booking and Expedia also sell sponsored listings that steer travelers toward particular properties. Wells Fargo estimates those will account for about 8% of Expedia’s revenue and a much higher percentage of profit next year.

Airbnb has more ways to adapt. More than half its listings are available only on its platform, and more than 90% of its traffic comes directly to its app or website.

The customer relationship doesn’t end after booking, either. Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke notes that 90% of Airbnb guests go on to message their hosts about arrival times, keys or local taxes, giving Airbnb a connection to both sides of the transaction.

How the companies have responded to the possible agentic future is telling.

Expedia quickly signed on as a Muse partner. Airbnb hasn’t, and Chief Executive Brian Chesky says AI chatbots have so far been a boon, sending customers to Airbnb’s website.

Chatbots might work for buying paper towels, he quipped at a Skift conference last month, but people enjoy planning trips. He argued that browsing dozens of homes isn’t something a text-based chatbot is well suited for.

Still, the AI jitters arrived just as Airbnb was persuading investors it deserved its pricey multiple. For years after its 2020 initial public offering, the stock—which trades around 25 to 30 times forward earnings—went nowhere. Investors saw a mature operator trading at a growth premium.

This year, Airbnb growth seems to be accelerating. The stock jumped in August after the company raised its full-year revenue-growth guidance with its second-quarter results. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski credits a run of product improvements under a revamped leadership team.

Among the changes: letting guests reserve now and pay later, adding hotels, and a redesigned home page and app. Investors were also betting on what comes next, including thousands more hotels, car rentals and, eventually, advertising.

The irony is that some of those growth drivers push Airbnb closer to the kind of business Booking and Expedia run—the kind of business AI agents could threaten. Even if AI agents capture a large share of travel planning and booking, Airbnb would capture the demand. But it and others would slowly lose control over how customers find and choose properties.

That would undermine the advertising opportunity investors are counting on. The bigger point for Airbnb and other marketplaces is that losing control of customer acquisition could mean surrendering some of their pricing power and margins.

To bulletproof itself, Airbnb might look to another e-commerce giant that has so far kept AI agents at arm’s length: Amazon.

Like Amazon, Airbnb has a loyal customer base and hard-to-match supply. But it has nothing like Prime membership to make customers think twice before taking their business elsewhere.

That is where loyalty comes in. Business travelers stick with Hilton or Marriott because enough nights earn them perks. Leisure travelers rarely accumulate stays with one chain. Airbnb has millions of listings and plenty of repeat customers, but no broad rewards program. It has begun experimenting with credits on hotel stays, but it should make loyalty a priority, not just a promotion.

Airbnb also plans to launch its own AI agent next year. But travelers using an agent might still want it to search Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking and hotel websites alike, rather than limit itself to one company’s inventory.

Eventually, Airbnb might have to strike deals with agent makers, using its unique homes as leverage to negotiate favorable terms, says Gawrelski. Such deals, along with rewards for loyal guests, could over the long term eat into the company’s roughly 13% take rate, he adds. But if they bring in enough additional bookings, the trade-off could be worthwhile.

History offers a reason not to panic. The shift from desktop to mobile unsettled investors in Alphabet and Amazon, but both emerged as major beneficiaries. Companies with valuable assets can come out of a platform shift stronger, if they adapt quickly enough.

Airbnb has homes the bots can’t easily replace. Now it needs to give guests a reason to insist on booking them there.

A deal could come together soon, the people said, assuming talks don’t fall apart or another suitor doesn’t emerge.

Decart has raised more than $400 million in venture capital funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures, according to PitchBook. It was valued at nearly $4 billion in May.

The company was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers, brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. Decart is also developing world models called Lucy and Oasis. World models can generate and simulate real-world 3-D environments.

Amazon has developed its own custom AI chip, Trainium3, in competition with Nvidia, which continues to dominate the market for graphics processing units, the specialized chips powering the AI boom. Amazon Web Services gave Decart early access to the chip in 2025 after meeting with the company and being impressed by its founders, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Amazon’s other sizable acquisitions in recent years include a $6.5 billion deal for the MGM movie and television studio in 2022 and a roughly $11 billion deal for Starlink rival Globalstar announced earlier this year.