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.
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.
> 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.
Perhaps the plan all along was to build enough rockets to blot out the sun over large parts of the Earth so only the space Chads can grow crops.
I know you are just being cynical, but tbf earth already has too much sun exposure.
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
> 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.
Tesla seems in a world of hurt unless robots start making space centers from moon rocks, yet that is also defying gravity.
The game is rigged. Our pensions and 401Ks are being forced to buy this slop. They can't resist taking all of the money off the table.
I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down.
> or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy
will also hold true for cost of mass to orbit. There's a lot riding on making that prediction come true for SpaceX, hence all the CapEx going into Starship.
So Starlink is a cash cow!
>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 ...).
I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: "Great Product, Horrible 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.
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.
Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile.
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
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.
Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.
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.
Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
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.
Tesla is mentionned 87 times. And even they explicitly state that they have strategic collaboration. They supposedly biggest projects are developped together (Macrohard, Terafab - all fugazzi, but still).
Related party transactions are close to a $1 Billion in 2025.
Nah.
Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.
The US would never let its access to space be cut off.
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.
There is discussion that if Taiwan gets a similar deal to Ukraine for StarLink access, it makes the porcupine strategy much more viable.
Conversely, any country which can’t get access to it loses a massive tool in the tool chest.
And sadly, it means that if the US continues to be fickle with allies, those allies may not be able to rely on such a valuable tool.
The worst thing is that we don't even have a say in all of this and chances are most likely that its gonna IPO and get listed on the index funds soon and once it gets into Index funds, a lot of collateral damage might happen.
I must say that I am not quite optimistic about there not existing collateral damage, there is happening a lot of corruption within financial markets in general with bending laws. The worst part is that we all would/might be the most impacted by it all
Clearly untrue. Given that's the source of the reported steep losses
You don't even have to read the document yourself.
Plenty of people are summarising it themselves and using AI.
The loss from Xai is over 7B
They are yet to start paying this debt no ?
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.
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.
Spending 40B to make $15B/year is a decent investment actually if you can do it for more than ~3-5 years.
"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with 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. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice."
A DC full of the same chips everyone else has is no moat at all.
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.
Definitely not silicon waste the second something faster arrives. There's still a world beyond cutting edge LLM slop after all.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
A few of them also have locked in power agreements.
Almost none of them have the expertise to build anything. Some of them are even outsourcing that to geezer tech and consulting shops.
It's not going to go well.
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.
So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
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.
His math is wrong though. He still claims H100s are worthless but in fact they are worth more now than when they were new.
And everything I've read from him is just.. weird? Like he has an anti-AI agenda and he interpreters everything through that?
Look at his latest public piece: https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/
He is complaining that there are no 1GW+ data centers, with evidence like this:
> For example, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported in October 2025 that Amazon’s Indiana-based (allegedly) 2.2GW Project Rainier data center was “operational,” but only seven out of a planned 30 buildings were actually operational, and her comment of “with two more campuses [of indeterminate capacity] underway.” This comment was buried two videos and 600 words into a piece that declared the data center was “now operational,” with the express intent of making you think the whole thing was operational.
But if you read the report that "buried" comment is far from buried - the whole thing is about how it is still under construction!
Of course 1GW data centers don't all come online at once! You get them online in the parts you can as soon as you can!
Ed Zitron is constantly wrong and writes like a child having a tantrum, I don’t understand why you take him seriously?
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...
From a previous comment of mine – the quotes are all from a single article:
He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person.
> I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence.
> I am so very bored of having this conversation
> I don't care about this number!
> Shut the fuck up!
> This isn't the early days of shit.
> Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine.
> $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic.
> This isn’t real business! Sorry!
> He said in one of his stupid and boring blogs that
> This man is full of shit! Hey, tech media people reading this — your readers hate this shit! Stop printing it! Stop it!
> It's here where I'm going to choose to scream.
> Dario Amodei — much like Sam Altman — is a liar, a crook, a carnival barker and a charlatan, and the things he promises are equal parts ridiculous and offensive.
> Why are we humoring these oafs?
> Despite Newton's fawning praise
> Nobody talks like this! This isn’t how human beings sound! I don’t like reading it!
> Ewww.
> I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.
> I know, I know, I'm a hater, I'm a pessimist, a cynic, but I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product
> I know this has been a rant-filled newsletter, but I'm so tired of being told to be excited about this warmed-up dogshit.
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
> I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously.
When I read this kind of thing, it’s very apparent that this is being driven entirely by spite not insight. He’s just so angry about everything. There are 57 exclamation marks in this article!
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085885#43086361
Pay too much attention to this kind of thing and it will poison your mind.
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?
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.
https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...
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.
But while this is a "good problem to have" it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable.
Now, I'm totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!
Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it would have been better to drink his own Kool Aid!
Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.
Worst case there wouldn't be anyone interested in renting it either, they would have tens of billions of useless data centers fastly losing value.
Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.
So net you are looking at finance expenses of 7-11 billion per year. The electricity costs will be significant on top of that, but harder to get a solid read on.
Net of everything, spacex may be getting a 14-28 percent yield before paying for electricity. After electricity/insurance/data/taxes/other expenses - I’d guess it’s anywhere between 0% and 7% yield.
Odds are good that Anthropic abandons the deal before the depreciation schedule completes. Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-to-rent-all-ai-capa...
I don't know about Cursor.
So, it's 10B, with $4b of that being attributed to a 5 year depreciation. The rest of the facility probably has a depreciation of around 20 years, and you can easily swap out GPU's, TPU's, Trititum, Tesla's own GPU's, as they start failing, so the normal depreciation curve only "kinda applies here".
There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.
Electricity is coming from Nat Gas Turbines, so again even though you have a some depreciation on the equipment there, you are getting it for far below meter prices.
So, from my math, he gets ROI on the chips in 3 months, and ROI on the entire facility in 9 months? That's literally the best investment of all time.
The news from the S1 is that they're renting both (see OP).
Essentially, they are using most of C2 for Grok5. That training run is coming to an End, and they will be leasing more capacity. So taht 1.25b per month will go up to around $1.5B-$2B per month as they finish grok 5.
Edit: from cofounder of Anthropic: "will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June." https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
So the 1.25B is for c1, and the revenue will scale into c2. No idea how much scale, but c2 is almost double the compute? So potentially $3b a month, but probably closer to $2.5B since they get a discount.
Who is "he"? SpaceX has $20bn of debt and $9bn in "other financing" corresponding to "obligations related to certain AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions."
I'll keep the below for integrity sake:
Well, i'm sure SpaceX bought Xai using some kind of prefered share/debt financing, but that's not to say that XAI had the original debt financing.
We can never know what the exact details, and the exact financing is on this debt. Maybe it's tied to Elon's Tesla Shares, Maybe it's tied to a convertible, maybe it is actual "loans" from a bank. Even at $9b in debt, and you naivly assume they are paying 10% (Def not 20% as OP claimed), you are paying $900m a year, for the entirety of xAi. Including that in the calculations to rent out the entire compute is folly. Not only is 900M not directly attributed to c1, cause it's split between c1, c2 and all the training runs, but you can never verify the interest. And even then, one month of this deal pays for the whole year of interest expense.
So go ahead and lower my estimate by 10%... doesn't make a difference.
If only there was some SEC filing available disclosing additional information about the 6-months $20bn bridge loan which was on the news four weeks ago…
Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.
Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.
But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.
Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.
I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.
Before Starlink we only send up like 1k ton of payload.
Starlink is the only reason why it jumped to 3k tons.
So SpaceX builds all of this to send its own stuff up which is basically only Starlink and in the future its own competition (amazon and leo). For something which is only consumed by 10 million customers right now and they increased the price for starlink which makes it even less competitive.
And Spacex has to send up Starlink every 5 years which keeps revenue low and Starlink is hard llinear growth as one Starlink Satelit can't handle that much traffic.
If his IPO makes all of that money, he will entertain us with funneling billions into a system which will then deliver a handful people onto mars if even.
A person on mars doesn't make money, it costs money.
Whats the goal here?
But, crucially, there's a huge level of uncertainty. You're making bets on the relative cost of nat gas and grid power, both of which have historically shown extreme volatility over that sort of timescale.
The level of risk means that very few proposed schemes go ahead in full unless there's some other factor involved (lack of sufficient grid connectivity, availability of subsidies).
5 year old H100s are now completed depreciated but are being rented out at higher rates than when they were new.
> Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
I'd LOVE a way to be on the other side of that bet.
If only there was another way outside of buying into all the other Elon risks associated with SpaceX.
Reality is that this is all to show some more (theorical) revenue and will be scrapped 6 months from now.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)
wickedly underrated film. my all time favorite in the skynet genre.
the vocoder speech at the end is just exquisite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
That's basically exactly this ^
That's not even close to what the Golden Dome is.
> The Golden Dome is a planned multi-layer missile defense system for the United States, intended to detect and destroy ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles before they launch or during their flight.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.
Anthropic is also profitable now.
By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.
They have something like 70% margin on inference.
You can quibble about the exact numbers, but I think it’s fairly clear at this point that inference is profitable with decent margins. Like you say, unit economics are more interesting than the profitability of the company as a whole.
>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.
So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?
"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. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice."
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like 'never' to me.
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/report-spacex-ip...
* "SpaceX IPO Scandal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388640
* "SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648226
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?).
SpaceX is at $18.7B
This is just incredibly off. A brief look at Yahoo Finance shows revenue has grown from $31.9B in 2022 -> $53.7B in trailing 12mos.
Which honestly surprises me, Uber was called a VC pump and dump scheme for years on HN before their IPO. Maybe that's the better lesson here (dont take financial advice from HN comments)
Uber successfully displaced most of the alternatives, slowly raised rates, and maintained operating margin while their fixed costs didn't have to scale as much. Post Travis they've, financially, nailed it.
It was hemorrhaging in many cities using extremely profitable cities like London and NYC to keep their global competitiveness.
Uber was able to pivot and become financially sound with two moves: - Uber Eats becoming first party delivery to restaurants (it started as a limited selection of items from some restaurants and quickly evolved into a Doordash-esque competitor) - Uber launching a 1B+ RR Ads business - margins on this are obviously incredible
Both of those combined with discipline in their ridesharing business (exiting the China market with a sale + stake, dumping their self-driving business when it became a money sink) have led to a recovery in their stock price, but it is FAR from the crazy expectations set up for VCs. I expect those in the last round didn't get a great return, but obviously folk like Benchmark exited like kings.
SpaceX TAM - "Enterprise AI Applications" is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. 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.
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...
As far as I can tell, there is no environmental regulation of how many kilograms of aluminum, silicon, etc. being added to the Earth's atmosphere when a Starlink burns up during re-entry.
cf. https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/forty-year-old-loopho... https://aas.org/about/governance/society-resolutions/atmosph...
Or alternatively I guess a few massive ones, but those would need to be truly massive to accommodate the solar panels and radiator fins required.
For orbits, those can and will be raised if it makes economical sense.
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.
The math still checks out though. Scott Manley did a video on it, and the top comment has some corrections: https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
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.
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.
Demand is there, money is coming in to these companies from customers. It isn't all circular.
Anthropic has grown 80x this year (according to their CEO). They are probably desperate to buy more inference compute for things like Claude Code, not for future investments. In the mean time, Grok seems to not have enough traction to utilize all the spare compute xAI has built with Colossus I and II.
This is one of those cases that shows that Elon is exceptionally better at atoms than he seems to be on the software side.
Right now, quite a few companies are discovering that the can turn inference capacity into revenue. Anthropic also can turn inference capacity into happy customers and mindshare, and they can turn lack of inference capacity into sad customers that might jump ship to OpenAI. And Anthropic wants to IPO, and they want to be as close to #1 as possible. And this whole phenomenon, industry-wide, has caused the demand for fancy chips to outstrip supply. Two years ago, DRAM was a low-margin industry, and now it’s not. If you bought a 5090 when it came out for around MSRP, you could resell it now at a healthy profit.
xAI appears to have effectively resold their datacenter at a healthy profit.
Sure, maybe xAI will try to bet that they can build another datacenter and sell/lease it at a healthy profit, but lots of players are trying to make that bet (bottlenecked by power and chip availability). And those bets could easily fail. And the players who don’t have adequate competition (SK Hynix, Micron, TSMC, etc) are going to jack up prices to try to capture more of the upside. And players like DeepSeek and Alibaba want to drive down the need for FLOPs and DRAM, because they don’t have enough and because they have a shortage of those but they don’t have a shortage of excellent AI development talent.
Oh, and China will build its datacenters on the ground, backed by more solar capacity than SpaceX can even dream of launching, and those datacenters will compete. And CXMT and Huawei will do everything in their power to ramp their own production, and SpaceX is not about to get first dibs.
On the bright side, Tesla’s AI5 finally taped out, and SpaceX will surely get some of those.
So maybe SpaceX will find $20bn of GPUs that they can resell or lease for $40bn of discounted revenue, but they could just as easily not find those GPUs or they might only get $17bn of discounted revenue and lose money on the whole affair.
Yes, energy and chips are some of the bottlenecks. SpaceX has a potential solution (solar powered data centers in orbit) where they are uniquely advantaged - no one can launch as much or as cheaply as they can.
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.
"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.
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.
Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
These companies outperform the market though.
I do understand it provides stability for longer term leadership which is good, ideally there would be a sunset provision which converted the supervoting shares to normal shares after a certain amount of time.
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-...
Sorry, what?
Remove AI and it's a good business.
Feel like sky is the limitidk
Don't try to short it. Sit it out if you feel the urge.
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?
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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) .)
And I do not believe any other crap at all. No space mining, manufacturing, moon/mars/venus/mercury/europa bases...
- 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)...
And Starship primary mission is next generation Starlink, not NASA.
> the debris field of two Starships breaking up in medium orbit could wipe out significant parts of the starlink constellation
Do you have any evidence of that?
NASA wouldn't allow operations that could potentially destroy most sats around the world in any plan it signs.
Evidence of what? That a space ship that breaks down releases debris? Or that "spaceship" is one of the biggest space vehicle right now?
>NASA wouldn't allow operations that could potentially destroy most sats around the world in any plan it signs.
How much does that hold when Elon has the ear of a know-nothing president who is absolutely unconcerned by any evidence?
> 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.
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.