"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.
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?
Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
Because they have two compute clusters? Colossus 1 and Colossus 2?
If your impression was that they went "we're done here", packed up and left, you're wrong. They're both operating and expanding their operations. And fighting environmental activists in court while at it.
Which I respect them for. "Environmental activists" are scum of the earth, as a rule, and "pay some activists to sue your competition" is a true time-honored classic of grey area legal warfare. SpaceX had to deal with that long before they merged with xAI - pretty much every time they built or expanded infrastructure.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything, and only the truly asinine lawsuits get thrown out pre-emptively, so "getting sued by environmental activists" is a more reliable indicator of "they're building something" and "they're stepping on some bigwig's toes" than it is of any "environmental damage". Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
Yes and both are getting sued? I wouldn't necessarily classify the NAACP as environmental activists, but they are concerned with the wellbeing of the people they represent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They have very 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.
Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
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.
Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
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.
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.
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.
We can thank Nasdaq for lowering the standards to fast track SpaceX into an index with only having 5% float. Soon after it lists on the major indexes, we are gonna have some turbulence.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
Assuming renting their datacenters doesn't cost them any more than running them for themselves, and plugging 15B a year of revenue (which ignores X entirely and other forms of revenue) you get 5.4B income, more than Starlink 4.4B income (which is slightly subsidized by the launch segment)
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.
Which is a fine thing to say, but CAC vs LTV (customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value of the customer) is the underlying equation. If it costs them $150 to give away a dish, but they get, say, $300 before the user churns, they still come out ahead.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?).
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.
Plus Uber's only increased their revenue 11->14B in the last 5yrs. SpaceX has added +$4B since 2024 and have fanciful plans in multiple markets that only a gambler like Musk would risk proposing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The idea that 100s of global pension funds don't do their due diligence when investing 100s of millions or billions of their members' future retirement funds is extremely naive. With sincerity, I hope you can find a way not to be so emotional about what Musk says and be more grounded in what his companies and their employees are doing.
Investing in SpaceX is one thing. Investing in SpaceX that is now merged with several other failed companies that each incur massive yearly additional losses.... let's see how long those funds still hold SpaceX.
Arguably Ukraine is still alive because of StarLink.
Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.
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.
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.
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.
That's because they use other terms like "Falcon 9/Heavy", "Starship", "Super Heavy", "launch vehicle/system", "booster", "upper/lower stage", and "spacecraft".
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.
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.
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.
Re your first statement, the problem is that there isn't enough compute out there. xAI built their own data centers (and plan to built more -> in orbit). I don't think Anthropic has done that to the same extent and it seems like they will partner with multiple vendors who can provide the compute they need.
"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."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
They are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer".
https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
Colossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that's fully operational.
Then why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state?
https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...
Because they have two compute clusters? Colossus 1 and Colossus 2?
If your impression was that they went "we're done here", packed up and left, you're wrong. They're both operating and expanding their operations. And fighting environmental activists in court while at it.
Which I respect them for. "Environmental activists" are scum of the earth, as a rule, and "pay some activists to sue your competition" is a true time-honored classic of grey area legal warfare. SpaceX had to deal with that long before they merged with xAI - pretty much every time they built or expanded infrastructure.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything, and only the truly asinine lawsuits get thrown out pre-emptively, so "getting sued by environmental activists" is a more reliable indicator of "they're building something" and "they're stepping on some bigwig's toes" than it is of any "environmental damage". Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
Yes and both are getting sued? I wouldn't necessarily classify the NAACP as environmental activists, but they are concerned with the wellbeing of the people they represent.
Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
a GB300 rack is like 5-6 million so seems a bit low.
It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.
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.
They have very 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.
Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.
Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
So that's where all of my money is going.
Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.
The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.
They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
And when Anthropic runs Claude on Allbirds' GPUs they'll give it a SOLE.md.
I see what you did there.
$45 billion for a 3 year rental.
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.
The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
Nobody pays MSRP at that scale
Given global demand and that they were late to the order party, they probably paid more lol
Closer to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.
More like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.
Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.
how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.
Are GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?
And how many of them were diverted from Tesla?
Pretty sure that Tesla didn't use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.
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
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.
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.
The space launch operating loss is like 10% of the Starlink operating income.
So Starlink is a cash cow!
Looks like it's gonna be closer to 2 trilly
I can't believe that my index funds are going to be looted to pay for this turd.
We can thank Nasdaq for lowering the standards to fast track SpaceX into an index with only having 5% float. Soon after it lists on the major indexes, we are gonna have some turbulence.
As if any of the marketcaps actualy reflect a company's true value. It's never just about financials.
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.
> 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.
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)
putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don't think it's different
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.
What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds?
short it?
Choose another index where it is not included?
It’s so big that it’s going to swing the markets when insiders start to liquidate after it is listed and on some indexes.
Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it's a money pit.
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.
If they cleaved off xAI and let it die, they'd be in much better shape!
Did you see that they are getting $15B/year from Anthropic because of what xAI built?
xAI is by far their most profitable segment, receiving 1.25B a month from Anthropic.
That 1.25B per month is not profit
Assuming renting their datacenters doesn't cost them any more than running them for themselves, and plugging 15B a year of revenue (which ignores X entirely and other forms of revenue) you get 5.4B income, more than Starlink 4.4B income (which is slightly subsidized by the launch segment)
Depreciation should be quite substantial - I recall reading that the starlink sats have a 5 year life expectancy?
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 ...).
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.
That shouldn't be included in ARPU.
Which is a fine thing to say, but CAC vs LTV (customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value of the customer) is the underlying equation. If it costs them $150 to give away a dish, but they get, say, $300 before the user churns, they still come out ahead.
They've been upping the subscription prices recently past few months.
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...
Wouldn't your pension be buying shares at $2T?
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.
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.
SpaceX is doing the monitoring and is making their system available to others for free: https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
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
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?).
Uber had about $11B revenue when it went public
SpaceX is at $18.7B
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.
Just to keep things in perspective, Uber IPO-ed for 82.4B. SpaceX is IPOing for over 10x more.
Plus Uber's only increased their revenue 11->14B in the last 5yrs. SpaceX has added +$4B since 2024 and have fanciful plans in multiple markets that only a gambler like Musk would risk proposing.
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.
You'll get a piece regardless if you're in index funds, as they're being strong-armed into buying at this awful price
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Spacex is not too big to fail.
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.
SpaceX and Tesla are different companies, fyi.
I know. They are very closely collaborating and are part of the same 'empire'. They will also go down together.
The idea that 100s of global pension funds don't do their due diligence when investing 100s of millions or billions of their members' future retirement funds is extremely naive. With sincerity, I hope you can find a way not to be so emotional about what Musk says and be more grounded in what his companies and their employees are doing.
Investing in SpaceX is one thing. Investing in SpaceX that is now merged with several other failed companies that each incur massive yearly additional losses.... let's see how long those funds still hold SpaceX.
Have you ever heard of a Mortgage Backed Security?
or Bespoke Tranche Opportunity, they don't say CDO any more. I mean, it's the same thing, but still.
>The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
Nah.
Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.
Arguably Ukraine is still alive because of StarLink.
Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.
NASA mostly runs on SpaceX, so it depends if you consider ISS to be critical. But I wouldn't say it would be mind boggling.
Cool, nationalise SpaceX, reintegrate its costs into NASA, done.
The US would never let its access to space be cut off.
The US actually did just that when it retired the shuttle program. We had to rely on Russia to get to the space station.
Watch lmao.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
148 mentions of "rocket". 773 mentions of " AI ".
That's because they use other terms like "Falcon 9/Heavy", "Starship", "Super Heavy", "launch vehicle/system", "booster", "upper/lower stage", and "spacecraft".
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.
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.
Did you read that Anthropic is paying them $15B/year for use of xAI's data centers? That changes things quite a bit
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.
Your second statement is correct IMO.
Re your first statement, the problem is that there isn't enough compute out there. xAI built their own data centers (and plan to built more -> in orbit). I don't think Anthropic has done that to the same extent and it seems like they will partner with multiple vendors who can provide the compute they need.
"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-...
"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.
"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.
Because dividends are considered failure for tech companies.
No way, shocking! /s
> For instance, Mr. Musk currently serves as Technoking and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla
Sorry, what?
Yeah... he gave himself that title back in 2021.
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.
wow x.ai is a literal money incinerator
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.
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.
Very surprised to see SpaceX valued higher than OpenAI.
They launched more mass to space than every other entity on planet earth combined last year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...