SpaceX lost $1.94 billion in the first quarter on $4.69 billion in revenue. That is one of the first things investors learned when the company opened its IPO filing to public view.
Only one of its three divisions made money. Starlink, the satellite internet unit, posted an operating profit of $1.19 billion. The AI division, by contrast, lost $2.47 billion on $818 million in revenue. The February purchase of xAI drove most of the company’s spending and a majority of its losses, and it accounted for 76 per cent of the $10.1 billion SpaceX spent on capital projects in the quarter.
Much of the outlook depends on technology that has not been built yet. The filing points to data centres powered by solar energy in space, and a potential market of $28.5 trillion.
A trillion-dollar listing
If the share sale succeeds, SpaceX could be valued at a record $1.75 trillion, which would put Elon Musk on track to become the first trillionaire. That would beat Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering, which set the IPO record at $1.7 trillion on the Riyadh exchange. SpaceX had planned to try to raise more than $75 billion, Reuters previously reported. It was aiming to list as early as June 12, with a roadshow targeted for June 4.
The company merged with xAI, the developer of the Grok chatbot, in a deal that valued the rocket maker at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. Anthropic, the filing shows, has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute capacity at its Colossus and Colossus II clusters in Memphis, Tennessee, through May 2029. SpaceX also disclosed that it is a defendant in several lawsuits over image-generation and editing features in Grok.
Musk keeps control
The governance terms are lopsided. Class B shares carry 10 votes each, while the Class A shares sold to the public carry one. Musk will keep 85.1 per cent of the combined voting power. Legal claims are forced into arbitration, and the filing restricts where cases can be filed. Musk is protected from being fired by anyone other than Musk.
The board has also tied much of his pay to goals that sound like science fiction: a permanent human colony on Mars, and space data centres with compute capacity powered by the equivalent of 100 terawatts, or 100,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors, Reuters previously reported.
Analysts and academics said Musk’s celebrity may matter to some buyers more than the underlying business. “There is somewhat of a halo effect around Musk and his unconventional vision,” said Reena Aggarwal, a finance professor at Georgetown University. “It is difficult to value companies like this because there is no peer group for comparison.”
The business itself is substantial. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has become the world’s largest space business, launching thousands of Starlink satellites. The network of about 10,000 satellites sells broadband to consumers, governments and enterprise customers. Its use of reusable rockets has changed the economics of space and forced rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to play catch-up. SpaceX plans to set aside a significant portion of shares for retail investors and to host about 1,500 of them at an event in June, Reuters reported in April.
