SpaceX S-1
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Discussion (294 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.
At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?
https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.
So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
2025:
- Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024
- Operating loss: -$2.6B
- Net loss: -$4.9B
- Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B
- Operating cash flow: $6.8B
- Capex: $20.7B
Segment breakdown:
- Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B adj. EBITDA
- Space / launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss
- AI / xAI / X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss
Starlink metrics:
- Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026
- ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026:
- Cash: $15.9B
- Marketable securities: $7.8B
- Total assets: $102.1B
- Total liabilities: $60.5B
- Debt / finance leases: about $30.3B
> Starlink seems to be a real cash machine
It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink.
I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down.
> or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy
will also hold true for cost of mass to orbit. There's a lot riding on making that prediction come true for SpaceX, hence all the CapEx going into Starship.
So Starlink is a cash cow!
Tesla seems in a world of hurt unless robots start making space centers from moon rocks, yet that is also defying gravity.
These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)".
The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line.
Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about.
The day after I got my dish I got an email that the price of the base plan would double. They also sent residential subscribers "free" dishes, which a ton of people took them up on right before the price change
Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile.
I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: "Great Product, Horrible Investment"
It's also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn't appealing for competitors to build out to, so there's a lot of markets where it's a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.
Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.
>ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase?
While I don't think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...).
I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.
I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...
[2] https://spacenews.com/anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...
They know the game very well. They know that if they manage to pump up the valuation high enough - they will be automatic money flowing in - regardless of actual valuations.
As far as I can tell, there is no environmental regulation of how many kilograms of aluminum, silicon, etc. being added to the Earth's atmosphere when a Starlink burns up during re-entry.
cf. https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/forty-year-old-loopho... https://aas.org/about/governance/society-resolutions/atmosph...
The math still checks out though. Scott Manley did a video on it, and the top comment has some corrections: https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
In 2026 one gets the impression that SpaceX is a huge company, among the largest in the world. It’s wild to see that its business volume is smaller than Northrop, smaller than Apple’s peripherals alone, smaller than Avnet (heard of ‘em?).
SpaceX is at $18.7B
I did want a piece of SpaceX but the valuation here is pretty eye watering compared to the fundamentals. I don't think I can put my money into this, although I suspect it will still do gangbusters based on hype and momentum.
Its also a real shame that SpaceX's competitors have not been able to get the same level of momentum. I know Starship has been delayed but its still hard to argue with total mass to orbit they're achieving right now.
The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T now. Yes, you might expect that SpaceX could launch Starship, build space-based datacenters, get a good foothold on the AI market, and grow Twitter. But you don't want to pay for future performance now, you want it to be discounted because you're taking on the risk that those things don't happen. $2T feels like expecting that story has already been actualized.
Right now, quite a few companies are discovering that the can turn inference capacity into revenue. Anthropic also can turn inference capacity into happy customers and mindshare, and they can turn lack of inference capacity into sad customers that might jump ship to OpenAI. And Anthropic wants to IPO, and they want to be as close to #1 as possible. And this whole phenomenon, industry-wide, has caused the demand for fancy chips to outstrip supply. Two years ago, DRAM was a low-margin industry, and now it’s not. If you bought a 5090 when it came out for around MSRP, you could resell it now at a healthy profit.
xAI appears to have effectively resold their datacenter at a healthy profit.
Sure, maybe xAI will try to bet that they can build another datacenter and sell/lease it at a healthy profit, but lots of players are trying to make that bet (bottlenecked by power and chip availability). And those bets could easily fail. And the players who don’t have adequate competition (SK Hynix, Micron, TSMC, etc) are going to jack up prices to try to capture more of the upside. And players like DeepSeek and Alibaba want to drive down the need for FLOPs and DRAM, because they don’t have enough and because they have a shortage of those but they don’t have a shortage of excellent AI development talent.
Oh, and China will build its datacenters on the ground, backed by more solar capacity than SpaceX can even dream of launching, and those datacenters will compete. And CXMT and Huawei will do everything in their power to ramp their own production, and SpaceX is not about to get first dibs.
On the bright side, Tesla’s AI5 finally taped out, and SpaceX will surely get some of those.
So maybe SpaceX will find $20bn of GPUs that they can resell or lease for $40bn of discounted revenue, but they could just as easily not find those GPUs or they might only get $17bn of discounted revenue and lose money on the whole affair.
Just compute the energy output of the Sun and claim they'll build a Dyson sphere around it.
Can charge a nice hefty subscription fee for using the Sun, just like Netflix.
> We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.
To be fair, he's not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.
Perhaps the plan all along was to build enough rockets to blot out the sun over large parts of the Earth so only the space Chads can grow crops.
For example, I used to work for an insurance-related tech company. They claimed their TAM was $9T-- the value of the entire global insurance market.
Mind you, those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden - which will run into tens of billions per year.
I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he's not cooking the books ?
Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It's just a matter of time until it unfolds.
Nah.
Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.
Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.
The whole thing looks to be proped up by Starlink which seems to be a genuinely solid business. xAI looks to be costing twice as much as it produces, and we dont even have good numbers for this yet since the deal is so new. This feels like WeWork but if WeWork also owned a successful coffee shop.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-...
How much do reusable launchers really bring down costs? Were the companies that elected not to go this way (almost all of them) incompetent or did they correctly assess the profitability problem of such a strategy? And how much does SpaceX market share is the result of actual efficiency vs. dumping the price with investor money to try to bankrupt competitors and corner the market?
TL:DR: where would Arianespace be today if they had elected to try reusable rockets and ended up at the same point as SpaceX? Would it be seen as a good gamble or a waste of taxpayer money?
(Note that SpaceX is where it is today also thanks to taxpayer money in military contracts and decades of R&D paid for by NASA and given away for free) .)
And I do not believe any other crap at all. No space mining, manufacturing, moon/mars/venus/mercury/europa bases...
- completely unproven
- could affect other parts of their business: if they try it and mess up, the debris field of two Starships breaking up in medium orbit could wipe out significant parts of the starlink constellation (and other satellite operations too)...
Also I’m concerned that if AI “works” (ie: country-of-genuses-in-a-box) that the moat of reusable rockets decreases substantially. What would stop Northrop from vibe coding their own starship?
"Under our charter, Mr. Musk and his affiliates are not restricted from owning assets or engaging in businesses that compete directly or indirectly with us"
Pg. 56
I think this part is interesting considering Tesla shareholders seem to have lost out on developing (x)AI (AGI?) internally.
Exciting! Everybody knew there's enormous wealth in those lands. Spaniards had brought over tons of gold and silver to Europe. The famous El Dorado remained undiscovered.
So it wasn't difficult for the directors and insiders of the South Sea Company to capture the British public's imagination. Even Sir Isaac Newton invested the equivalent of millions of pounds today in the venture.
Turns out the actual monopoly was extremely limited because the Spaniards didn't want to trade with Britain. The bubble burst by 1720 and ruined thousands of people, from aristocrats to small bourgeois tradesmen.
Anyway, surely that has nothing to do with the multitrillions of wealth that await on the Moon and Mars.
SpaceX TAM - "Enterprise AI Applications" is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. This is a rocket company pretending it's a frontier AI lab.
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/report-spacex-ip...
Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.
> Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.
Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
These companies outperform the market though.
Was the first to setup a Gigawatt Datacenter, than had to run it empty and rent it out despite having its own AI model which should in theory eat up all of the compute.
Then he was the first to create a Softwareonly company Macrohard, which should rewrite everything from scratch and would just need compute, but nope.
Was the first creating a company drilling tunnels, was the first creating solar roofs...
Hopefully he will be the first on Mars and doesn't come back.
* "SpaceX IPO Scandal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388640
* "SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648226
Sounds like 'never' to me.
Feel like sky is the limitidk
It's not a risk factor I see in the prospectus but seems plausible to me.
Just like with the AI company vesting, I imagine a scenario where a company seeds its own competition by realizing the monetary gains before the work is done. Maybe there's precedent in the dot com bubble. Certainly people were able to sell before the dip a la Cuban and broadcast.com. But I'm thinking more more specifically inducing competitive space ventures.
Remove AI and it's a good business.
Sorry, what?
I did. I’m not buying. lol I won’t get an allocation but I also want to see where this shakes out. So in 6 months time if starlink is the gem that people say then sure.
I think he finds a way to trade inflated SpaceX stock to o buy Tesla and call it a day.
"We believe this capability will also enable creating a petawatt-scale AI constellation through the use of lunar satellite production and a lunar mass driver for launch activities."
Someone read waaaaaay to much Sci-fi
Hey lets build a petawatt scale AI somehwere outside of our planet while people can barely survive day to day in the millions but we need to have petawatt-scale AI for these poor people because the AI will do what?
What Elon what willl your Petawatt AI do for us?
Don't try to short it. Sit it out if you feel the urge.
In some ways this looks like Meta. Meta throws off a tonne of money with it's ad business, but you have to discount it because Zuck has control and an attitude that it's his toy. So you have to discount the ad revenue business because there's a good chance that Zuck just pisses it up the wall. The difference here is you've got a speculative idea that SpaceX might eventually become a massive revenue driver, but Musk is already pissing the money up the wall.
I get why this makes sense for Musk - get SpaceX public, use the stock to merge with Tesla, it gets all his companies under 1 roof and gives him enough voting rights to do whatever the hell he likes. It makes sense for SpaceX early shareholers - they need liquidity.
I do not know what sense it makes for any investor. The absolute best you can argue is it's going to be a meme stock.