Musk’s SpaceX is disclosing its finances for the first time as it prepares for an IPO
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s privately owned rocket and satellite maker, has long been a financial mystery even as it has become synonymous with bold plans to reach for the stars.
That changed on Wednesday, when co exposed how lucrative her rocket launch and satellite internet business was.
SpaceX’s revenue will grow to $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33 percent from a year earlier, the company said in a filing required of firms seeking to go public. In the first three months of this year, sales rose to $4.7 billion from $4.1 billion in the same period a year ago.
But the company lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a profit of $791 million in 2024, as capital spending nearly doubled to $20.7 billion from heavy spending on artificial intelligence development. In the first three months of this year, SpaceX lost almost as much money as the entire year of 2025, recording a loss of $4.3 billion.
SpaceX, which also owns social media platform X and xAI, creator of chatbot Grok, has pulled back the curtain on its finances for the first time as it prepares for what could be one of its biggest initial public offerings yet. The company, which values itself at $1.25 trillion, plans to go public as early as next month and could try to raise $50 billion to $75 billion in an offering.
If successful, SpaceX’s IPO could pave the way for other huge offerings, including AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI, which are also set to confidentially file for IPOs in the coming weeks. Last week, AI chipmaker Cerebras kicked off an expected wave of offerings, surging 68 percent on its first day of trading, making it the biggest IPO of the year so far and the largest of any tech firm since 2019.
SpaceX’s strong debut on the public markets would bring generational wealth to Wall Street, the company’s employees and, of course, Mr. Musk, who is already the world’s richest man and could become its first billionaire.
Mr. Musk and a SpaceX spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
How closely Mr. Musk is tied to SpaceX was clearer in the filing. According to the filing, he owns approximately 50 percent of the company’s outstanding shares and controls more than 85 percent of shareholder votes due to a class of high-voting shares. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, was the only other executive named in the filing who held a seven-figure stake in voting stock.
Based on SpaceX’s current valuation of $1.25 trillion, Mr. Musk’s ownership stake is worth more than $635 billion.
“SpaceX is his company,” Jay Ritter, an IPO expert at the University of Florida, said of Mr. Musk’s stake.
Founded in 2002, SpaceX has grown into one of the world’s leading space companies by developing partially reusable rockets with the goal of eventually getting humans to Mars and making humans multiplanetary. In the United States, SpaceX is responsible five out of every six launches into spaceaccording to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies.
In February, Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with xAI, which already owned X. Since then, he has expanded the company’s goals, saying SpaceX will build artificial intelligence data centers to orbit the Earth, create facilities to manufacture complex AI chips and develop human colonies on the moon.
Potential investors would fund those moonshots, which have raised skepticism given Mr. Musk’s optimistic timelines for those goals. The billionaire has also shifted SpaceX’s focus away from taking humans to Mars in recent months.
The company is preparing another test launch of its largest Starship rocket for Thursday. Mr Musk said Starship would eventually take people to Mars and take data centers into space.
SpaceX’s most lucrative business is Starlink, its satellite Internet service, which had 10.3 million subscribers at the end of March, double from a year earlier, according to a company filing. Last year, Starlink posted an operating profit of roughly $4.4 billion, also more than double the previous year.
In its filing, SpaceX said it has the “largest actionable total market” in “human history” and estimates it at $28.5 trillion. This included a $1.6 trillion market for Starlink, $370 billion from “space solutions” and $26.5 trillion in AI, which included an estimate of $22.6 trillion for AI “enterprise applications.”
While much of SpaceX’s capital spending has gone into artificial intelligence, the company’s filing indicated that it is already seeing business opportunities from its investments. After building two large data centers known as Colossus 1 and 2 in Tennessee, SpaceX struck a deal with AI startup Anthropic to lease its computing power for $1.25 billion a month for the next three years, according to the filing.
The document said the company’s goals had “no precedent” and acknowledged risks including rocket launch failure, AI development costs, scaling Starlink and potential reputational damage associated with Grok, which had 6.3 million paid subscribers at the end of March.
Mr. Musk has previously expressed distrust of the scrutiny and disclosure that comes with running a public company. In 2018, amid turmoil and pressure from shareholders at his Tesla automaker, he attempted to take the company private, leading to a protracted battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He criticized the agency, as well as short sellers of Tesla stock.
“There’s a lot of pressure on a public company, like huge pressure, not to have a bad quarter,” Mr. Musk said in 2023 in an interview broadcast live on X, suggesting that short-term disclosures don’t help long-term thinking. “In fact, it can lead to a less efficient operation, where at the end of the quarter you go to great lengths to not let people down.”
This time Mr. Musk made sure he had a vise on his company. Through his voting control, “Mr. Musk will have the power to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval, including the election of all of our directors, and to control our business and affairs,” the filing said.
Ahead of the public release of its IPO prospectus on Wednesday, SpaceX hosted some shareholders and potential investors at its facilities in California, Texas and Tennessee to showcase its services. After releasing their financial numbers, most companies that go public meet with potential investors to gauge interest in buying their shares, in a process known as a roadshow.
A SpaceX IPO would create winners beyond Mr. Musk. They would include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that invested in SpaceX in 2008, and Valor Equity Partners, whose founder Antonio Gracias is a close friend of Mr. Musk and sits on SpaceX’s board.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, which were vying for top billing as underwriters of the prospectus, were told on Tuesday evening that Goldman Sachs would be the lead underwriter in the bid for the bank, two people familiar with the situation said.
SpaceX did not say how many shares it will sell in the IPO or at what price. It will trade on Nasdaq under the symbol SPCX.