FTC clears Musk acquisition of SpaceX alumni startup Mesh

The Federal Trade Commission has given Elon Musk clearance to acquire Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded by three former SpaceX engineers, TechCrunch reported on June 26, 2026. The potential acquisition was revealed in a Federal Trade Commission filing that confirmed the agency expedited its antitrust review. Bloomberg first reported the filing. Mesh Optical Technologies, also referred to as Mesh Optical, came out of stealth in February after raising a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital. The startup develops hardware for fast data center communications. Its co-founders, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos and Serena Grown-Haeberli, previously developed the optical communication links that interconnect thousands of SpaceX Starlink satellites. The founders identified an opportunity to create optical transceivers for terrestrial data centers because light-based hardware is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electrical-based systems. SpaceX has recently entered agreements with Anthropic, Google and the open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide compute capacity at its data centers. Acquiring Mesh could allow SpaceX to improve the efficiency of its data centers on Earth or, in the future, in space, the report said.