SpaceX S-1

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/spaceexplorationtechnologi.htm

by cachecow • 2 months ago

458 374 2 months ago

Geeek• 2 months ago

Their stated TAM is bonkers. A total of $28.5 trillion: $370B Space, $1.6T Connectivity, $26.5T in AI. With AI becoming more and more commoditized, the AI number is insane.

tonyhart7• 2 months ago

well if they talking future when US gov print money at unbelievable rate then this is very plausible (especially if they can work on space mining)

seattle_spring• 2 months ago

That number is grossly inflated for every S-1. It's about as close to meaningless as you could possibly get.

For example, I used to work for an insurance-related tech company. They claimed their TAM was $9T-- the value of the entire global insurance market.

LarsDu883• 2 months ago

With these kind of made up numbers, they might as well have simply used the fucking Kardeshev scale.

Just compute the energy output of the Sun and claim they'll build a Dyson sphere around it.

Can charge a nice hefty subscription fee for using the Sun, just like Netflix.

fragmede3• 2 months ago

Shhh, that's SpaceX's real play. Put a giant sun shade between the Earth and the sun, and make everyone on Earth pay for sunlight. No pay? No crops. No food. Solves global warming.

kentm6• 2 months ago

Kardashev Type II is mentioned three times in the doc.

We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.

To be fair, he's not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.

tim333• 2 months ago

I calculated if you price energy at 5c per kWh then $28.5 trillion is much less than a pico Kardashev II. Nothing really.

Zigurd4• 2 months ago

Where I'm from, TAM has to be real enough that somebody else is making money off of it. But if EBITDA doesn't count the cost of replacing your short lived satellites, who is to say what TAM means anymore.

Eldodi• 2 months ago

Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets.

2025:

- Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024

- Operating loss: -$2.6B

- Net loss: -$4.9B

- Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B

- Operating cash flow: $6.8B

- Capex: $20.7B

Segment breakdown:

- Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B adj. EBITDA

- Space / launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss

- AI / xAI / X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss

Starlink metrics:

- Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026

- ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026

Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026:

- Cash: $15.9B

- Marketable securities: $7.8B

- Total assets: $102.1B

- Total liabilities: $60.5B

- Debt / finance leases: about $30.3B

runako• 2 months ago

The numbers overall are worse than I expected. I can't believe Serious People are talking about putting this in the market at a trilly.

Starlink seems to be a real cash machine

It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink.

maipen• 2 months ago

As if any of the marketcaps actualy reflect a company's true value. It's never just about financials.

Analemma_• 2 months ago

I can't believe that my index funds are going to be looted to pay for this turd.

aeternum3• 2 months ago

Looks like it's gonna be closer to 2 trilly

amluto3• 2 months ago

The use of EBITDA for Starlink is also interesting. For something like terrestrial fiber, I can imagine thinking that there’s a lot of depreciation on the books, but that most of the equipment keeps working after the depreciation period or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy, and that the right of ways and attachments don’t really depreciate. But Starlink satellites are actually gone at the end of their useful life.

I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down.

huevosabio• 2 months ago

The space launch operating loss is like 10% of the Starlink operating income.

So Starlink is a cash cow!

moralestapia2• 2 months ago

Typo: I'm sure you meant >1T.

ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026

Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase?

While I don't think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...).

boelboel• 2 months ago

They've been upping the subscription prices recently past few months.

tristanj3• 2 months ago

Starlink is giving away the satellite dishes for free to grow customers. These dishes are expensive to manufacture and cost the company hundreds of dollars each. The estimated manufacturing cost of a Starlink standard dish is around $400.

alopha• 2 months ago

Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it's a money pit.

abirch2• 2 months ago

SpaceX itself wouldn't be that bad, it's the xAI. It's going to burn through cash.

I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: "Great Product, Horrible Investment"

porphyra• 2 months ago

It's pretty much expected that a rapidly growing high tech company is gonna have a lot of losses and debt right? They're just spending huge amounts of money on capex. Not doing so would be like floating minerals in Starcraft: symptomatic of bad macro.

bombcar2• 2 months ago

Now you have me imagining uThermal as CEO of SpaceX and I think it'd be worth it to see the cheese runs.

jfengel• 2 months ago

That's kind of the whole point of a stock market. If you already had a solid revenue stream, you wouldn't need investment.

These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)".

The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.

kentm6• 2 months ago

The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.

My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line.

Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about.

stainablesteel2• 2 months ago

putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don't think it's different

electriclove15• 2 months ago

There were talks in the past about spinning Starlink out. Perhaps the thinking that led them to keep Starlink in is the same thinking about their new data center business (what they got from xAI and will grow in orbit in the future)

yibg4• 2 months ago

These numbers would be ridiculous even for a software play. < 20B in revenue at almost 2T valuation? That's almost 100x revenue multiples at a not so great revenue growth rate.

rchaud• 2 months ago

xAI "acquired" Twitter, so rolling it into SpaceX is a way to hide a badly distressed asset inside a potential moneymaker and hope nobody notices. Like mortgage backed securities.

jpkw• 2 months ago

Depreciation should be quite substantial - I recall reading that the starlink sats have a 5 year life expectancy?

Spartan-S63• 2 months ago

If they cleaved off xAI and let it die, they'd be in much better shape!

electriclove15• 2 months ago

Did you see that they are getting $15B/year from Anthropic because of what xAI built?

redox992• 2 months ago

xAI is by far their most profitable segment, receiving 1.25B a month from Anthropic.

wongarsu• 2 months ago

They are switching from digging for gold to selling shovels (capacity in their DCs). And it looks like they managed to make hay at the perfect time

JeremyNT• 2 months ago

What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds?

tobias3• 2 months ago

Choose another index where it is not included?

doctoboggan• 2 months ago

short it?

__turbobrew__• 2 months ago

I have been thinking the same thing. I don’t want this turd in my index funds.

jaccola• 2 months ago

Mistiming is equivalent to being wrong. And Musk is good at keeping valuations high! So who knows when it will tank.

sebzim4500• 2 months ago

Figure out how much of your fund it is and take a short position to hedge it

ACCount372• 2 months ago

I'm surprised launch is only -$0.65B, given just how much were they sinking into launch infrastructure and R&D for Starship.

Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile.

pclmulqdq• 2 months ago

"Printing cash" is generous given the expenses and attempted $2 trillion valuation.

Rebelgecko• 2 months ago

Spacex has been playing fuckfuck games in recent months to boost their subscriber numbers.

The day after I got my dish I got an email that the price of the base plan would double. They also sent residential subscribers "free" dishes, which a ton of people took them up on right before the price change

takinola• 2 months ago

Can someone ELI5 Starlink revenue sources? At the core, it's an ISP (but served from space). What does Starlink have that differentiates from any other ISP? Is it because the TAM is global? That may be true at the margin, but I am sure most eligible subscribers would prefer a land-based system (eg no one in SF is cancelling their Xfinity to use Starlink) so how much is really left for them?

greycol• 2 months ago

It's because they're good speeds in a lot of places that couldn't get good speeds before. It's also great for mobile work sites, i.e. construction sites, drilling camps, other b2b service businesses where a bunch of portacoms rock up to a site. Anywhere it's mildly hilly you can't actually assume you'll get a signal outside of town but a satellite dish basically guarantees that. Even if you can guarantee your in a spot long term the upfront cost of fibre or a tower may not balance out as cheaper than just eating the higher bandwidth costs.

It's also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn't appealing for competitors to build out to, so there's a lot of markets where it's a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.

kristiandupont• 2 months ago

For one thing, just about every airline in the world is a potential customer.

jcattle2• 2 months ago

There's a huge number of people in developing countries (think Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Mexico) where the country just lagged on internet build out. Now in these countries the price of a subscription will be a lot lower, than the >100$ you pay in the US, but since (simplified) the only additional cost per customer is the cost of the end terminal, it's still worth it for the ARR. The break-even point per customer will just be further in the future.

Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.

stefan_• 2 months ago

I think the ISP story is a bit shitty outside some niche markets (mobile internet on airplanes and the like), but the military applications are massive. Everything is moving into drones and Starlink terminals are small enough to fit on them all, while being essentially unjammable, giving you a coarse location signal on top and plenty of bandwidth.

dzhiurgis7• 2 months ago

In NZ you can buy add-on so you can text/fb messenger/maps/weather and even apple music thru your phone via Starlink. I can't imagine this being super popular add-on, but if telco just rolls that into main offering I'd assume eventually that will be new norm.

TheAlchemist8• 2 months ago

Finally ! Can we end the debate about how mind blowingly profitable this company is ?

Mind you, those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden - which will run into tens of billions per year.

I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.

vardump• 2 months ago

I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.

Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.

TheAlchemist8• 2 months ago

So be it. What's the alternative ? Continue a bubble ? Ride on the 'FSD by the end of the year' or 'thousands of Optimus next year' for the next 10 years ?

The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he's not cooking the books ?

Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It's just a matter of time until it unfolds.

moralestapia2• 2 months ago

The collateral damage would be mind boggling.

Nah.

Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.

malfist• 2 months ago

Spacex is not too big to fail.

inemesitaffia4• 2 months ago

those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden

Clearly untrue. Given that's the source of the reported steep losses

TheAlchemist8• 2 months ago

How so ? xAI / Twitter were merged in this year - they don't show up anywhere in the financials.

peder• 2 months ago

Bruh. This is unhinged.

SpaceX is a good company with a ton of potential future revenue on their data center and Starlink businesses. Nothing about this company is fugazzi.

ryzvonusef• 2 months ago

Would you be willing stake some money on your claim and short the stock?

bigbuppo• 2 months ago

So, a significant amount of self-dealing, and Elon Musk has an 85.1% voting share in the company. That sounds like a really great thing. There is no sarcasm in that previous statement. None at all.

randallsquared• 2 months ago

One of the major reasons for fans of space exploration to be concerned about all this was the dilution of control that seemed inherent in an IPO, but since that seems to be fixed, I don't hate the idea any more.

seydor3• 2 months ago

The irony is many think this is an advantage. They don't want the ignorant masses to steer his companies.

datadrivenangel4• 2 months ago

So this confirms that SpaceX was making a lot of cash and plowing it back into R&D, and that the X/Twitter/xAI merger is concrete shoes on the good parts.

electriclove15• 2 months ago

Did you read that Anthropic is paying them $15B/year for use of xAI's data centers? That changes things quite a bit

austhrow743• 2 months ago

Does xAI have some sort of edge over Anthropic when it comes to buying future compute?

If not, this just seems like grok not being as successful as they would have liked and then finding some other use for the compute they had bought for it while at the same time Anthropic can’t keep up with demand for claude.

datadrivenangel4• 2 months ago

And SpaceX /xAI spent almost $20 B over the last 3 years on "AI" capex and has AI capex and operations costing $10B combined in Q1 2026...

Spending 40B to make $15B/year is a decent investment actually if you can do it for more than ~3-5 years.

seydor3• 2 months ago

They are paying per month in a quickly shifting world.

throwaway858257• 2 months ago

If the anthropoc deal is profitable for spacex eventually anthropic will just build their own DC and cut out the middle man.

A DC full of the same chips everyone else has is no moat at all.

danny_codes4• 2 months ago

They had to buy the data-center first.

impulser_4• 2 months ago

"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee"

Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.

gjsman-10002• 2 months ago

$45 billion for a 3 year rental.

thetrb• 2 months ago

how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.

TheAlchemist8• 2 months ago

What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.

LarsDu883• 2 months ago

Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.

nolta• 2 months ago

Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”

baron816• 2 months ago

Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.

nickff• 2 months ago

The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.

neosat2• 2 months ago

has anyone done the math on: 1. cost to build out and run the data centers 2. cost of compute (hardware and energy) 3. depreciation of legacy GPU and thus value at the end of 3 years.

And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.

impulser_4• 2 months ago

Well Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s & GB300s.

So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.

treis• 2 months ago

It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.

electriclove15• 2 months ago

Maybe it is a win/win. Anthropic gets desperately needed compute at a fair price. SpaceXAI sells compute at a fair price and gets desperately needed revenues.

chatmasta• 2 months ago

SpaceX is already indicating their strategy on this, because they’re renting their last-gen data center to Anthropic and keeping the current-gen data center for themselves. Rinse and repeat.

foxylad• 2 months ago

Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.

He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.

And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.

ykl• 2 months ago

At the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new?

At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?

impulser_4• 2 months ago

They are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer".

https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375

keeda3• 2 months ago

Whoa. I've said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view.

While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario's part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better.

This won't hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won't look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.

sdwr• 2 months ago

They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.

chvid• 2 months ago

As far as I can Google the colossus data centers did cost about 7-10 and 18 B respectively.

Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.

BoredPositron2• 2 months ago

It's really not.

epolanski• 2 months ago

We all know very little of that is gonna materialize long term.

Reality is that this is all to show some more (theorical) revenue and will be scrapped 6 months from now.

Zigurd4• 2 months ago

Opex and debt service will eat that cash flow.

kennethrc• 2 months ago

COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)

gclawes• 2 months ago

THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM

infinitewars3• 2 months ago

SpaceX has a Golden Dome contract,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

That's basically exactly this ^

Arodex4• 2 months ago

Can't wait for the next model to be called "torment nexus" /s

etempleton6• 2 months ago

The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.

kurthr• 2 months ago

Except that they're loaning a bunch of money to their "customers" to "buy" their products. It's still really circular.

btian2• 2 months ago

How is SpaceX not making money?

Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.

Anthropic is also profitable now.

dopa423652• 2 months ago

The most honest memory cartel is reporting stupid profit numbers too!

Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...

South Korean April exports rise 48.0% y/y as chip boom extends

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-april...

To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.

bottlepalm3• 2 months ago

There is a lot of money coming in from industry, actually an exponentially increasing amount of money - money that would otherwise go to employees is now going to AI companies. There are more startups than you can shake a stick at that are basically creating virtual workers for xyz task and selling them to companies. All that money is funneling back to AI companies. It's a gold rush and employee salaries are the gold.

kilroy123• 2 months ago

Hot take: the US government should invest money into AI. This is why this is happening. China is doing it.

cherioo• 2 months ago

It’s also interesting that Cursor (that spacex is acquiring ) also just announced yesterday they are training in colossus.

So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?

mvkel2• 2 months ago

If this doesn't completely destroy any benefit of doubt that people have in Dario, I don't know what to say. The guy has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth since the foundation of Anth. Over and over he repeated that Anth's investment in compute would not be reckless; it would represent sanity and be proportional to growth. Over and over Anth told users that the models weren't nerfed overnight, we were just prompting wrong. As expected, Anth simply failed to make the early compute deals when everyone else did, and are now forced to be on the wrong end of price gouging just to keep pace. Actions speak louder than words.

lz400• 2 months ago

Even if we consider what they pay for colossus high (I've no idea, I haven't looked at the numbers), wouldn't this a bit be different from "investing in infrastructure"? They're not building the DC themselves, they're just renting, they can scale down to 0 anytime and not have pressure to recover costs, they don't have debt on the HW, etc.

nl3• 2 months ago

I don't see how this follows at all?

It's true that Anthropic didn't buy as much compute as OpenAI. But OpenAI's compute purchases are one of the largest investments in human history.

It's also true that they are now scrambling for compute, and might be paying more than OpenAI paid. But now they have the revenue to justify it!

To me it is the opposite of "speaking out of both sides of his mouth" - he's been consistent in his "we won't be reckless in buying compute too far ahead of demand" message.

jatora• 2 months ago

skeptical of someone who talks about anthropic enough that they think 'anth' is a reasonable abbreviation lol. maybe youre not wrong but youre definitely biased and not coming to conclusions in a rational way

Traster3• 2 months ago

I don't think this is right. Anthropic's growth in the last 6 months went hockey stick in quite an unexpected way (eclipsing OpenAI), so they've done what is sensible - they've increased their compute spend. I don't know if what they're buying from SpaceX is good value, I think there's plenty of reasons to think they got a fine deal. X AI failed. Everyone left. So SpaceX is sitting with a bunch of empty server farms. Yes, Anthropic are desparate for compute, but SpaceX are desparate to IPO a company with double digit billion dollar revenue for $2T so I think there's good reason that this deal represents reasonable value.

chilmers• 2 months ago

So you're complaining that his actions matched his words?

He didn't make compute deals until he saw the growth necessary to justify them. As a result, they're paying over-the-odds compared to if they'd have make deals earlier. Maybe that was a poor business decision, but I'm not sure how it represents speaking out of "both sides of his mouth"? Sounds like he was honest.

kgc• 2 months ago

If my napkin math is right, Anthropic will make SpaceX/Xai whole on the initial investment for Colossus 2 + operating costs + a small profit by the end of the contract. No massive profits, although they may be able to fudge accounting to make it seem that way.

world2vec• 2 months ago

You're ignoring all the depreciation costs.

pu_pe• 2 months ago

148 mentions of "rocket". 773 mentions of " AI ".

ggreer• 2 months ago

That's because they use other terms like "Falcon 9/Heavy", "Starship", "Super Heavy", "launch vehicle/system", "booster", "upper/lower stage", and "spacecraft".

SimianSci• 2 months ago

They make some incredibly outlandish claims over their total addressable market, one can only wonder where $26 trillion dollars in expected AI revenue would even come from, with 22T of that being from "enterprise" when they have no real products yet.

The whole thing looks to be proped up by Starlink which seems to be a genuinely solid business. xAI looks to be costing twice as much as it produces, and we dont even have good numbers for this yet since the deal is so new. This feels like WeWork but if WeWork also owned a successful coffee shop.

einrealist• 2 months ago

"We do not anticipate declaring or paying any cash dividends to holders of our common stock in the foreseeable future."

Sounds like 'never' to me.

wmf2• 2 months ago

Because dividends are considered failure for tech companies.

kentm6• 2 months ago

Growth companies not paying dividends is normal and they're likely many years out from when they'd need to seriously consider it. I don't think thats a big deal.

throw0101c2• 2 months ago

Now that the paperwork is out, can anyone confirm this earlier report "Report: SpaceX IPO gives Musk unchecked power and forbids investor lawsuits":

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/report-spacex-ip...

throw0101c2• 2 months ago

Perhaps related:

* "SpaceX IPO Scandal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388640

* "SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648226

arthurofbabylon• 2 months ago

It’s surprising just how low the revenue is for SpaceX. There are some 700+ companies with larger revenue figures, and yet just a small handful exceed SpaceX’s proposed valuation.

In 2026 one gets the impression that SpaceX is a huge company, among the largest in the world. It’s wild to see that its business volume is smaller than Northrop, smaller than Apple’s peripherals alone, smaller than Avnet (heard of ‘em?).

dmix4• 2 months ago

Uber had about $11B revenue when it went public

SpaceX is at $18.7B

darkwizard423• 2 months ago

Just to keep things in perspective, Uber IPO-ed for 82.4B. SpaceX is IPOing for over 10x more.

neosat2• 2 months ago

Revenue is not the right metric when you compare space trips to trips inside a city. The more relevant numbers are EBITDA, Operating cash flow, Profits.

throw0101a2• 2 months ago

SpaceX is at $18.7B

And profits?

If SpaceX was a space services company (launch, ISP) the numbers involved may be nice; but with all the AI garbage rolled in, it's hemorrhaging money.

throw0101a2• 2 months ago

It’s surprising just how low the revenue is for SpaceX. There are some 700+ companies with larger revenue figures, and yet just a small handful exceed SpaceX’s proposed valuation.

As Patrick Boyle points out in this video "SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though" (6m40s):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

SpaceX has about the same revenue as breakfast cereal maker Kellogg's, but Kellogg's is more profitable.

nemothekid• 2 months ago

Am I reading this right?

SpaceX TAM - "Enterprise AI Applications" is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. This is a rocket company pretending it's a frontier AI lab.

bwfan123• 2 months ago

This is a rocket company pretending it's a frontier AI lab

A frontier AI lab that rents out its GPUs to other frontier labs.

Jabbles• 2 months ago

If any company can put profitable data centers in space, it will be SpaceX. But I doubt that any company can. The difficulties of the physics and engineering of cooling seem like they will always outweigh the advantages of keeping your data center on Earth.

I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.

I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...

[2] https://spacenews.com/anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...

fragmede3• 2 months ago

How do you price regulatory restrictions? The laws governing space are more lax than those governing how much chromium Tesla can dump into their waste water. By building in space, they get to completely sidestep any regulatory issues on Earth, like not being allowed to build what they want, wherever they want, how they want. It's annoying getting permits to do whatever on my house, but for businesses, it's a real problem.

darkwizard423• 2 months ago

The biggest regulation of building in space is... where do the debris go. You are tightly monitored for how much trash reenters into the atmosphere, so there is still SOME level of regulation.

electriclove15• 2 months ago

Wouldn't your pension be buying shares at $2T?

stainablesteel2• 2 months ago

elon has a great wall of china's worth of plaques with comments exactly like this, and his companies are still worth more than their combined weight in gold

yibg4• 2 months ago

The unit economics of orbital DC just doesn't work with today's technology. Assuming 0 ongoing OpEx(free energy), the launch cost of the satellite itself, along with solar panels, radiators as well as the chip themselves just doesn't make sense given the ~5 year operational lifespan of both the chips and the satellites.

dzhiurgis7• 2 months ago

Chips yea, but sats can last much longer. Chips are relatively lightweight, so replacing them in a new mission absolutely makes sense.

stanislavb• 2 months ago

This: "I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice."

They know the game very well. They know that if they manage to pump up the valuation high enough - they will be automatic money flowing in - regardless of actual valuations.

nickburns4• 2 months ago

You know 'space' is a vacuum, right?

roer3• 2 months ago

I don't see how that would lessen their concerns? Exactly because space is a vacuum, cooling is harder since you can't do convection.

The math still checks out though. Scott Manley did a video on it, and the top comment has some corrections: https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80

throwaway858257• 2 months ago

Space data centers are a bad idea. Every DC has a non zero number of employees that do maintenance. Going from 99% to 99.9repeating% reliability is extremely expensive. That's why satellites cost billions and take 10 years to build.

kentm6• 2 months ago

SpaceX is incredibly exciting, but I was skeptical when XAI and Twitter were rolled into it. The S-1 here makes it even more disappointing.

I did want a piece of SpaceX but the valuation here is pretty eye watering compared to the fundamentals. I don't think I can put my money into this, although I suspect it will still do gangbusters based on hype and momentum.

Its also a real shame that SpaceX's competitors have not been able to get the same level of momentum. I know Starship has been delayed but its still hard to argue with total mass to orbit they're achieving right now.

electriclove15• 2 months ago

Hopefully their competitors will keep advancing but that just reinforces that how hard space is and that SpaceX is doing things no one else currently can.

bmau5• 2 months ago

You'll get a piece regardless if you're in index funds, as they're being strong-armed into buying at this awful price

sethops12• 2 months ago

They aren't being strong-armed, NASDAQ is literally changing the rules to appease Musk and get in on the grift. Move your money elsewhere while you still can.

kentm6• 2 months ago

Its unfortunate that its being fast tracked and I'm really annoyed that NASDAQ is doing this. But I think that the impact should be relatively minimal, at least for the funds I hold. I really just find the transparent grift annoying.

ericd3• 2 months ago

I think this only applies currently for the Nasdaq index, and the only Nasdaq index fund that comes to mind is QQQ. I think fewer people are currently being hit than are worried about it.

etempleton6• 2 months ago

SpaceX would be an interesting IPO without XAI. It is hemorrhaging money and is in what, 6th place in the AI race while hemorrhaging X subscribers every month. Theoretically the company could focus on what is profitable and be strong fundamental company, but this is Elon we are talking about he is going to do whatever he wants to do.

kentm6• 2 months ago

To be honest, it could be one with XAi too. Im no fan of Musk and Grok but the deal with Anthropic pointed out by other contributors isn't nothing. And I don't think SpaceX losing money at this stage isn't quite the problem that people think it is -- as someone who as worked at companies losing money and then going on to make quite a bit. Revenue growth is there.

The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T now. Yes, you might expect that SpaceX could launch Starship, build space-based datacenters, get a good foothold on the AI market, and grow Twitter. But you don't want to pay for future performance now, you want it to be discounted because you're taking on the risk that those things don't happen. $2T feels like expecting that story has already been actualized.

big_toast2• 2 months ago

Is there any risk to SpaceX that the Musk brand pulls the market cap too far ahead now?

It's not a risk factor I see in the prospectus but seems plausible to me.

Just like with the AI company vesting, I imagine a scenario where a company seeds its own competition by realizing the monetary gains before the work is done. Maybe there's precedent in the dot com bubble. Certainly people were able to sell before the dip a la Cuban and broadcast.com. But I'm thinking more more specifically inducing competitive space ventures.

big_toast2• 2 months ago

"Mr. Musk or his affiliates may become aware, from time to time, of certain business opportunities ... and may direct such opportunities to other businesses in which they have invested."

"Under our charter, Mr. Musk and his affiliates are not restricted from owning assets or engaging in businesses that compete directly or indirectly with us"

Pg. 56

I think this part is interesting considering Tesla shareholders seem to have lost out on developing (x)AI (AGI?) internally.

tristanj3• 2 months ago

Elon Musk owns 12.3% of Class A shares and 93.6% of Class B shares. Class B shares have 10x the voting power of class A shares. Overall Elon controls 85.1% of the voting power in the company. If Elon sells any of his Class B shares, they automatically convert into Class A shares.

Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.

Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.

quickthrowman2• 2 months ago

The S&P 500 index criteria didn’t allow this sort of nonsense starting in 2017, but they relaxed the rule again to allow dual class listings to be included in the index in 2023.

Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.

rapsey• 2 months ago

I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.

These companies outperform the market though.

Traster3• 2 months ago

I guarantee the reason that number is so high is so that SpaceX can offer to merge with Tesla and the end results will be Musk having over 50% control in the combined entity. He's been very clear that's what he's been attempting to do with via his compensation packages at Tesla and now he's found a different way of acheiving the same thing.

gigatexal• 2 months ago

Who is gonna buy at the IPO and why or why not? (Assumes you read the S1).

I did. I’m not buying. lol I won’t get an allocation but I also want to see where this shakes out. So in 6 months time if starlink is the gem that people say then sure.

I think he finds a way to trade inflated SpaceX stock to o buy Tesla and call it a day.

danny_codes4• 2 months ago

Your 401k will be forced to buy it for you, not to worry. You don't get a choice! And apparently no shareholder voting power either.

htrp• 2 months ago

wow x.ai is a literal money incinerator

doener• 2 months ago

"XAI, the artificial intelligence company Elon Musk created and recently merged into SpaceX, is not helping on that front. The filing shows SpaceX directed around 60% of its capital spending in 2025 to its AI division, or around $20 billion. And yet that division — which houses the chatbot Grok — lost billions last year, and only grew revenue by about 22%. That’s far below the reported revenue growth rates at frontier AI labs."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-...

pastel8739• 2 months ago

For instance, Mr. Musk currently serves as Technoking and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla

Sorry, what?

HerbManic• 2 months ago

Yeah... he gave himself that title back in 2021.

k2xl• 2 months ago

Very surprised to see SpaceX valued higher than OpenAI.

hersko2• 2 months ago

They launched more mass to space than every other entity on planet earth combined last year.

inemesitaffia4• 2 months ago

Remove Grok and it's a great business.

Remove AI and it's a good business.

bakies• 2 months ago

"AI" is just renting a datacenter space, which is not nearly as excited to put on your balance sheet as "AI"

robofanatic• 2 months ago

How will this affect TSLA share holders? Will the value go up or down?

seydor3• 2 months ago

We need polling to gauge the markets. Betting markets are poisoned

Johnny_Bonk• 2 months ago

Anthropic, you mean the supply chain risk anthropic as so brightly conveyed by petey

bayareabadboy• 2 months ago

Space mining gotta be worth a lot longer term

Feel like sky is the limitidk

brikym• 2 months ago

If anyone wants to get in early on these bags Echostar(ticker: SATS) has a contract to exchange spectrum for $40B of SpaceX shares.

nickburns4• 2 months ago

This thread contains a significantly higher concentration of dumb than the typical front page post. Gee, I wonder why.

Topology1• 2 months ago

Am I stupid for not knowing SpaceX's official name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp.?

Linkd• 2 months ago

Wait until you find out what X is short for

dgellow3• 2 months ago

eXploration?

tehlike2• 2 months ago

Simply put, never bet against Elon.

Don't try to short it. Sit it out if you feel the urge.

protocolture3• 2 months ago

laughs in twitter

tehlike2• 2 months ago

investors in twitter are made whole.

erulabs• 2 months ago

Feels risky to push the S-1 a day before the latest starship launch. If there is a catastrophic failure OR a perfect success it feels like it would be material here.

Also I’m concerned that if AI “works” (ie: country-of-genuses-in-a-box) that the moat of reusable rockets decreases substantially. What would stop Northrop from vibe coding their own starship?

zarzavat• 2 months ago

Rockets are mostly proprietary knowledge so you won't be able to vibecode a starship no matter how smart the AI is.

Zigurd4• 2 months ago

That's an interesting use of the word material. The problem with the IPO is that it's vibes based. There's already a lot to doubt about starship. If there is some large failure on this flight, it won't change the actual material value, or lack thereof. But it would shift the vibes.

burnerRhodov39• 2 months ago

This is going to make so many smart people working in hardware soooo fkin rich. We are about to witness an absolute flood of Ex-SpaceX employees start and invest in companies targeted at space and general manufacturing and hardware. This is how we win.

Traster3• 2 months ago

Seeing both OpenAI and SpaceX trying to yeet themselves into public markets as fast as possible I've got to wonder if the music is slowing. There's a neat rocket company with a satellite business in here somewhere, but it's massively over-shadowed by totally underwater social media site and a failed AI experiment, both of which have been bailed out. I think the best thing you can say is that atleast we aren't aware of any other massively unprofitable bad bets Musk has made that he's going to need to bail out soon.

In some ways this looks like Meta. Meta throws off a tonne of money with it's ad business, but you have to discount it because Zuck has control and an attitude that it's his toy. So you have to discount the ad revenue business because there's a good chance that Zuck just pisses it up the wall. The difference here is you've got a speculative idea that SpaceX might eventually become a massive revenue driver, but Musk is already pissing the money up the wall.

I get why this makes sense for Musk - get SpaceX public, use the stock to merge with Tesla, it gets all his companies under 1 roof and gives him enough voting rights to do whatever the hell he likes. It makes sense for SpaceX early shareholers - they need liquidity.

I do not know what sense it makes for any investor. The absolute best you can argue is it's going to be a meme stock.

Glohrischi2• 2 months ago

First first first...

Was the first to setup a Gigawatt Datacenter, than had to run it empty and rent it out despite having its own AI model which should in theory eat up all of the compute.

Then he was the first to create a Softwareonly company Macrohard, which should rewrite everything from scratch and would just need compute, but nope.

Was the first creating a company drilling tunnels, was the first creating solar roofs...

Hopefully he will be the first on Mars and doesn't come back.

Glohrischi2• 2 months ago

Hahahahahhhahh wtf...

"We believe this capability will also enable creating a petawatt-scale AI constellation through the use of lunar satellite production and a lunar mass driver for launch activities."

Someone read waaaaaay to much Sci-fi

Hey lets build a petawatt scale AI somehwere outside of our planet while people can barely survive day to day in the millions but we need to have petawatt-scale AI for these poor people because the AI will do what?

What Elon what willl your Petawatt AI do for us?

pavlov• 2 months ago

The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht granted the South Sea Company a monopoly for British trading with the Spanish South America and Pacific.

Exciting! Everybody knew there's enormous wealth in those lands. Spaniards had brought over tons of gold and silver to Europe. The famous El Dorado remained undiscovered.

So it wasn't difficult for the directors and insiders of the South Sea Company to capture the British public's imagination. Even Sir Isaac Newton invested the equivalent of millions of pounds today in the venture.

Turns out the actual monopoly was extremely limited because the Spaniards didn't want to trade with Britain. The bubble burst by 1720 and ruined thousands of people, from aristocrats to small bourgeois tradesmen.

Anyway, surely that has nothing to do with the multitrillions of wealth that await on the Moon and Mars.

Arodex4• 2 months ago

We heard for years that other companies in the launch business (ULA, Arianespace) were just incompetent, ossified businesses, and that SpaceX was revolutionizing the field; and now we discover that SpaceX, after all their effort, is barely profitable and has to run the clock by diversifying and seeking an IPO...

How much do reusable launchers really bring down costs? Were the companies that elected not to go this way (almost all of them) incompetent or did they correctly assess the profitability problem of such a strategy? And how much does SpaceX market share is the result of actual efficiency vs. dumping the price with investor money to try to bankrupt competitors and corner the market?

TL:DR: where would Arianespace be today if they had elected to try reusable rockets and ended up at the same point as SpaceX? Would it be seen as a good gamble or a waste of taxpayer money?

(Note that SpaceX is where it is today also thanks to taxpayer money in military contracts and decades of R&D paid for by NASA and given away for free) .)

Ekaros• 2 months ago

Also really how many satellites we actually need globally? There must be some sensible limit.

And I do not believe any other crap at all. No space mining, manufacturing, moon/mars/venus/mercury/europa bases...

Arodex4• 2 months ago

They also have contracts with NASA that could be cancelled the same way the lunar gateway was, like in-space refueling. Which is:

- completely unproven

- could affect other parts of their business: if they try it and mess up, the debris field of two Starships breaking up in medium orbit could wipe out significant parts of the starlink constellation (and other satellite operations too)...

panick21_3• 2 months ago

That's silly, SpaceX now is a huge social media and AI company. SpaceX did like 3 billion in involvement in Starlink. The other rocket companies could never do something like that and survive.

How much do reusable launchers really bring down costs?

Without reusable launch the flight rates they have would not be possilbe so they are the bases for why the business has value.

Were the companies that elected not to go this way (almost all of them)

Actually literally everybody is getting into re-usability. Maybe check your facts. ULA is working on engine re-usability. RocketLab next rocket is reusable. Europe and China next rockets will be reusable. BlueOrigin of course as well.

where would Arianespace be today if they had elected to try reusable rockets and ended up at the same point as SpaceX?

It would have failed because Arianespace literally couldn't build a reusable rocket. You can't just magic up a reusable rocket.

If in 2014, when Europe decided to not do the Ariane 5 ME and instead do an Ariane 6 reusable, it would take another 5 years minimum until a reusable rocket would happen.

Ariane 6 took 10 years while being a minor, evolution of Ariane 5 based on Ariane 5 ME project. It involved using a new engine that had been in development for 15 years already and would take 25 years to fly for the first time.

The main engine was only slightly upgraded and could never be reusable.

It would take 15 years at least to have a new engine and rocket developed. And it would have cost 3-5x as much as Ariane 6.

This would not have happened because it was politically impossible, literally totally impossible, Arianespace can't make decisions like that.

Arguably it would have been smarter to do Ariane 5 ME and not do Ariane 6 and instead build a smaller reusable rocket. Basically what they are doing now but 10 years earlier.

(Note that SpaceX is where it is today also thanks to taxpayer money in military contracts and decades of R&D paid for by NASA and given away for free) .)

That is very reductionist. Many companies get taxpayer money in one way or another. SpaceX from the beginning did lots of private funding and had lots of private costumers. In terms of aerospace they are pretty unique in how much of their own investment they do.

And they actually mostly LOST MONEY on their early government contracts, because they offered them so cheaply. But those government contracts allowed them to lend money and invest. Had they not been able to use that and get many private costumers, they would have gone bust.

As for only because of NASA R&D is true but its just the typical everything is connected argument. Yes because government helped road infrastructure 300 years ago we have SpaceX today, but every other company also had roads and NASA and didn't turn into SpaceX.

RocketPlaneKistler got a better deal from NASA and wanted to build a reusable rocket, yes they are dead and SpaceX is where it is today. ULA had decades of massive subsidies and insane priced launches and have done nothing innovative what so ever.

olivierroy• 2 months ago

PDF format here: https://data.olivierroy.dev/spacex-s1.pdf

dzonga2• 2 months ago

if & when the market corrects - the crash will be one of the ages.

there's 3 businesses rolled into 1 entity as a cover to take money from gullible retail investors. SpaceX the launch business is legit. the other 2 are r fake n losing money n yet will be money will be stolen the retail investors.

anyone with half a brain knows the TAM in the S1 is like 350Bn of the space launch business - the 28TN is just fake.

throwaway858257• 2 months ago

The assumption retail investors have 30B to invest or are willing to move 30B is quite a load bearing assumption.

dzonga2• 2 months ago

401Ks, & other instruments etc. all financed by the public.

danny_codes4• 2 months ago

We don't get to chose. 401Ks will be forced to buy within weeks because NASDAQ got bribed hard.

clearstack• 2 months ago

first thing to look at in any S-1: revenue concentration. SpaceX has two businesses — launch and Starlink. if Starlink is >60% of revenue, the thesis is really just a telecom bet with a rocket moat

habosa• 2 months ago

https://x.com/gnoble79/status/2031757996510839191

We are the liquidity here. If you have index funds, SpaceX is going to get more of your money much faster and on better terms than any other IPO in history. Even if you love this stock and this valuation, you should find this type of retail investor manipulation disturbing.

SpaceX S-1

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