The initial numbers are out and they aren't pretty.
Joe Wilkins writing for Futurism:
Elon Musk has just pulled back the curtain on the biggest public stock offering in history, and the numbers are ghastly.
SpaceX, which is expected to go public on Nasdaq in June, just released the first round of financial summaries all companies are required to share when they’re about to sell stock to the public for the first time. The documents reveal Musk is targeting a raise of at least $80 billion — for a proposed valuation of $1.75 trillion — which would immediately make the rocket company one of the top 10 most valuable conglomerates in the US, Axios calculated.
With that kind of valuation in mind, one might expect SpaceX to be massively profitable going into its debut — but that’d be dead wrong.
According to the financial statement, the company lost $4.9 billion in 2025, even though it brought in around $18.7 billion in revenue. It’s not like that situation is about to turn around in time for the IPO, either: over the first three months of 2026, SpaceX posted further net losses of $4.3 billion.
Allison Morrow writing for CNN (from her newsletter):
Musk is practically unfireable
Musk will be SpaceX’s chief executive, chief technology officer, and chairman of the board. And he seems to have gone out of his way to ensure he won’t have to deal with any of the shareholder brush-backs he’s faced at Tesla. The filing shows Musk holds the majority of super-voting shares known as Class B stock.
Musk will be able to “elect, remove or fill any vacancy” among the top shareholders on the board and “have the power to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval, including election of all our directors, and to control our business and affairs.”
Musk controls 85% of the shareholder vote, according to the filing, which means he’d have to vote to fire himself.
This is a good time to remind those who haven't been following closely that Musk has a long history of using companies he controls to boost the stock of his other companies or to buy out his failed efforts. If this goes through, don't be surprised if SpaceX suddenly feels the need to order a million or so Optimus robots.
Matt Levine writing for Bloomberg (from his newsletter);
“We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (‘TAM’) in human history,” says the prospectus for SpaceX’s initial public offering, and, duh, of course. Every other company in human history has had essentially the same business model, which is “we will sell goods or services to people on Earth for money.” The upper bound on every company’s TAM has been something like the number of people on Earth times the amount of money they can spend, the gross domestic product of the Earth.
SpaceX has much higher ambitions. “Our mission,” it says, “is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” The upper bound on SpaceX’s TAM is the gross domestic product of the universe. Elon Musk is going to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and then we’re really cooking. Why sell goods and services to a few billion people crammed onto Earth, when you can sell goods and services to a few trillion people spread among the stars? “We believe that our current space efforts will catalyze transformative breakthroughs that could reshape terrestrial industries and lead to the emergence of new trillion-dollar markets on the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” says the prospectus. Every other company is stuck in our dreary modern reality, but SpaceX operates in a Star Trek universe with obviously larger economic potential. [1]
I’m sort of kidding. Here is SpaceX’s actual description of its total addressable market [2] :
We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications. For illustrative purposes of sizing our addressable market opportunity, we exclude China and Russia from our global estimates.
The entirety of SpaceX’s estimated market for “space-enabled solutions” is about half of that for “consumer subscriptions” to AI chatbots. Substantially all — 79.6% — of SpaceX’s total addressable market is for enterprise AI applications. SpaceX looks around at the economic possibilities of extending the light of consciousness to the stars and thinks “we’re gonna build tools to automate spreadsheets and sell them to investment banks.”
When you get to the slides at the end, keep in mind that in order for SpaceX to live up to its projections, not only will generative AI have to go from losing money to being an enormous cash cow, but xAI will have to dominate the market. Unless you're scoring on non-consensual sexualized images generated, it is no off to a good start.
Patrick Boyle (who weighed in previously here) revisited the IPO last week and was rather... critical.
Longtime Musk critic Thunderf00t had the clever idea of bringing Musk's own chatbot Grok into the discussion.
Remember what we said about xAI needing to dominate the competition?
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