Numbers

SpaceX IPO: Elon Musk Wants a $1.75 Trillion Valuation on $18.7 Billion Revenue

co-written by newsrooms.ai21. May 2026, 12:27

Elon Musk’s SpaceX isn’t the financial giant many expected. The IPO prospectus filed yesterday reveals a remarkable gap between operational reality and the future promises with which the company is heading to the Nasdaq – under the ticker “SPCX,” trading is set to begin as early as June 12.

200 S&P 500 Companies Generate More Revenue

The 2025 figures speak a clear language: On consolidated revenue of $18.674 billion, SpaceX posted an operating loss of $2.589 billion and a net loss of roughly $4.9 billion. For context: 200 companies in the S&P 500 generated higher revenues last year than SpaceX – including Musk’s own carmaker Tesla, with five times the sales.

The trend continued in the first quarter of 2026: $4.694 billion in revenue, but an operating loss of $1.943 billion. Particularly sobering is the performance of the newly integrated AI segment (X and xAI, acquired on February 2, 2026): With $818 million in quarterly revenue, the platform sits about a third below what Twitter alone generated in the quarter before Musk’s takeover – while running an operating loss of $2.469 billion in the same period.

The Revenue Multiple: A Valuation Beyond All Benchmarks

At the targeted valuation of $1.75 trillion, the price-to-sales ratio comes in at around 94x on 2025 revenue. For perspective: Nvidia currently trades at a revenue multiple in the single to low double digits, Tesla at roughly 8-10x. Even the most aggressive tech valuations of recent years typically ranged between 20x and 40x.

At this multiple, SpaceX would rank among the world’s ten most valuable companies – and would make Musk the first trillionaire in history. The valuation simply cannot be justified by current business figures. It’s a bet on what’s supposed to come.

Starlink: The Only Bright Spot

Only one segment within the SpaceX group is currently profitable: The Connectivity business around Starlink generated $11.387 billion in revenue in 2025 with an operating profit of $4.423 billion – a 49.8 percent increase year-over-year. With around 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, Starlink is the cash cow financing everything else.

The actual rocket business (Falcon, Dragon, Starship) brought in only $4.086 billion in revenue in 2025 and posted an operating loss of $657 million – with $3 billion alone flowing into Starship development. The AI segment burned through $6.355 billion operationally in 2025.

What Investors Are Really Buying: AI Compute in Orbit

Anyone paying $1.75 trillion for SpaceX isn’t buying a balance sheet – they’re buying a vision. And this vision is laid out in surprisingly concrete terms in the prospectus. The addressable market is estimated at $28.5 trillion: $370 billion for Space, $1.6 trillion for Connectivity, and a staggering $26.5 trillion for AI – of which $22.7 trillion sits in the enterprise segment alone.

The core promise investors must believe in is called Orbital AI Compute: Starting in 2028, millions of AI compute satellites are to be deployed in sun-synchronous orbit – solar-powered, passively cooled through heat radiation into space. The goal is breathtaking: bringing 100 gigawatts of annual compute capacity into orbit, equivalent to roughly one million tons of payload per year. On top of this come plans like the “Lunar Mass Driver” – an electromagnetic acceleration system on the Moon – and the Terafab project launched jointly with Tesla and Intel, with a long-term target of one terawatt of chip production per year.

There are already initial signs that this plan could be commercially viable: Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month starting in May 2026 for compute capacity in the COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II data centers – roughly $45 billion over three years. The irony: A direct Grok competitor is renting space on Musk’s infrastructure. A similar option exists with Anysphere (Cursor) at an implied equity value of $60 billion.