SpaceX IPO puts Musk’s AI empire – and ambitions – in the spotlight
SpaceX has finally opened its books to public markets, revealing a company generating tens of billions in revenue, burning through cash at an extraordinary speed and betting its future on AI as much as rockets.
The long-awaited Nasdaq float, expected next month, could value Elon Musk’s space and AI empire at as much as $1.75 trillion, making it the largest IPO in Wall Street history and potentially pushing Musk towards trillionaire status.
But beneath the scale and spectacle of the listing lies a more complicated picture. The filing showed SpaceX generated $18.7bn in revenue last year, driven largely by Starlink, its satellite internet business, which brought in $11.4bn and has become the company’s core profit engine.
Reusable rockets and government launch contracts continue to give the business a commanding lead over rivals, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin – yet the company still lost billions.
SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9bn in 2025, while losses in the first quarter of this year alone reached more than $4bn as spending accelerated across AI infrastructure, data centres and xAI, Musk’s AI venture now folded into the wider SpaceX group.
The filing makes clear that investors are increasingly backing what some analysts have dubbed the “Muskonomy” – an interconnected web of AI, satellites, social media, and compute infrastructure tied together by the controversial man himself.
Starlink pays up while AI burns the cash
For now, Starlink remains the financial backbone of the business. The satellite network serves around 10 million users globally and accounted for more than half of the group’s total revenue last year.
But the AI division, which includes both xAI and X, remains deeply loss-making, posting billions in operating losses as Musk races to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the increasingly expensive AI arms race.
Still, SpaceX is pitching AI as its long-term growth story, and the filing outlined ambitions to build orbital data centres powered by solar energy in space, alongside plans for AI compute infrastructure on a scale few competitors could realistically match.
SpaceX also revealed a multibillion-dollar deal with Anthropic to rent capacity at its Colossus AI facilities.
At the same time, the IPO documents highlighted mounting legal and reputational risks around Grok, Musk’s chatbot, including lawsuits tied to explicit AI-generated imagery and ongoing regulatory scrutiny in multiple jurisdictions.
Investors now face a familiar Muskian cocktail of enormous ambition, huge capital requirements and very little interest in conventional limits.