Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled back the curtain on a business empire that has racked up ballooning losses and debt after acquiring a cash-hungry startup, and pumping billions of dollars into futuristic endeavors ranging from AI to a Mars rocket.
The prospectus that SpaceX filed Wednesday for an IPO of unprecedented size boiled down to a well-worn strategy that entrepreneurs commonly hawk up and down Wall Street: in order to make money, we need to spend money. And nowhere are the outlays larger than in space and artificial intelligence.
“The big takeaway for me is that SpaceX is now an AI company,” said Chad Anderson, an early SpaceX investor and founder of Space Capital.
Musk is seeking to pull off the unprecedented feat of achieving a $2 trillion valuation from the outset, an audacious plan that’s set to transform both the public and private markets if it succeeds. At the same time, the prospectus lays bare concerns over whether private companies with limited financial disclosures and largely illiquid shares are reaching unjustified valuations in venture capital-led funding rounds.
“Investors aren’t paying for today’s business, they’re paying for the platform that owns the next 50 years of orbital infrastructure,” Anderson said.
The company’s future projections, even when championed by a celebrity figure like Musk, are nothing short of extreme.
SpaceX states that their total addressable market, or maximum revenue ceiling, is $28.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, according to the filing.
Nearly all of that would come from AI, with space making up $370 billion and Starlink-based connectivity $1.6 trillion. Mike Alves, founder and fund manager of VIDA Vision Fund and early investor in SpaceX, said it’s a “shocker” how aggressively the company is pitching its AI capabilities.
“For a rocket company, that’s wild,” Alves said.
Then again, buried in a filing of over hundreds of pages were glimmers of financial promise. The company reported $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue, up by about a third in each of the last two years. At that pace, SpaceX will be a $24.2 billion company by year-end.
Starlink, its internet-from-space business, has turned into a cash cow, raking in $3.26 billion in revenue in the first three months of the year, with some 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries. Income from those operations reached $4.42 billion last year, doubling from a year earlier.
SpaceX has already transformed space travel and won billions of dollars in launch and satellite contracts with NASA and the Pentagon, rewarding investors willing to be patient.
A letter from the billionaire announcing the xAI acquisition declared the deal would create “the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.”
But at the same time, the company’s debt and spending has spiraled, supersized by the recent acquisition of Musk’s AI company.
It posted a $4.94 billion net loss last year as the company retroactively took on the debt of xAI’s investments. Capital expenditures fueling Musk’s plans have nearly doubled, reaching $20.7 billion last year, compared with $11.2 billion in 2024.
SpaceX’s space-related business doesn’t come cheap either.
The company’s other combined businesses had a total of $13.54 billion in capital expenditure in 2025 and 2024. SpaceX noted it invested $3 billion on its Starship rocket last year alone.
SpaceX is saddled with about $29 billion of debt, including a $20 billion bridge loan used partly to refinance liabilities amassed during its acquisition of xAI.
And then there’s Musk’s outsized pay. The billionaire controls about 85.1% of voting power through dual-class shares, giving him an iron grip on the company’s direction and making him virtually impossible to fire.
In one of the more outlandish plans outlined, SpaceX would reward Musk a special bonus for putting 1 million people on Mars — and achieving a market capitalization of $7.5 trillion.
Musk isn’t the only billionaire emphasizing the idea that the worth of his company lies in its future value to humanity.
“If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving,” said Amazon.com Inc. and Blue Origin LLC founder Jeff Bezos in an interview with CNBC that aired before the filing.
Blue Origin, like SpaceX, is also in the business of launching rockets, landing humans on the moon and building out space-based data centers, efforts which have not been fully realized yet.
In a post on X, Musk responded to a clip of the interview, stating “Bravo @JeffBezos!”
Written by: Sana Pashankar and Loren Grush — With assistance from Natalia Kniazhevich @Bloomberg
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