Photo: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto/Getty Images
After years of operating in relative darkness for a company of its size and ambitions, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally pulled back the curtain on Wednesday when it filed to go public. In a sweeping prospectus laying out a mission “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” SpaceX also revealed exactly how much money it makes (and how much it loses), the vicelike grip Musk holds on the business, why changing Twitter’s name to X was financially nuts, who else owns a serious chunk of super-voting shares, and the “spicy” liability posed by Grok. The prospectus also tells would-be shareholders how big the company expects to grow — and what people can expect regarding the fate of humanity should investors fail to pony up. Spoiler alert: It’s a mass-extinction event.
SpaceX’s revenue was a whopping $18.7 billion in 2025, a 33 percent increase from the year prior. At the same time, it lost $4.9 billion last year — and lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone. The company attributed the losses to spending on AI.
Of the money SpaceX has made, the majority has come from Starlink, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the company’s revenue and brought in $3.26 billion in the first quarter of this year.
Sure, SpaceX may be losing a lot of money now, but it doesn’t expect to lose money forever. According to the filing, the company thinks it could pull in $28.5 trillion — yes, you read that right — in the future, thanks to “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history.” That market, per the company, includes $26.5 trillion from AI, $370 billion in “space-enabled solutions,” and $740 billion from Starlink satellites.
The filing discloses that the value of X declined by a staggering $3.71 billion after Musk changed the company’s name, Fast Company reports. That amount, the prospectus declares, was “primarily related to the impairment of the Twitter brand following its rebranding to X.” The prospectus also reveals that between X and Grok, 1.3 billion “supported accounts” were active in the last 12 months; later, though, it notes one shouldn’t put too much stock in that number because “the total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active.”
As Wired notes, SpaceX has warned potential investors that Grok’s “Spicy” and “Unhinged” modes could open the company up to increased regulatory scrutiny and tarnish the brand’s reputation, with the filing declaring, “Because these modes may be more irreverent and harsher than our standard offerings, they present heightened risks, including reputational harm, the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs, potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery, intellectual property infringement, or content that could be viewed as exploitative, harmful, harassing, abusive, or discriminatory.” A consortium of AI safety groups warned investors this week that there are “unpriced risks” to the SpaceX IPO owing to xAI’s safety practices. (As a reminder, Grok has already come under fire for its love for Adolf Hitler and penchant for removing real people’s clothes without consent.)
The filing shows that Musk owns approximately 50 percent of the company and controls more than 85 percent of its voting power thanks to the many super-shares he holds. (SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, is the only other executive to come anywhere near close, holding more than 12 million combined Class A and Class B shares.) As SpaceX’s confidential S-1 filing revealed last month, the company has told investors that Musk will retain his unprecedented power even after the IPO and “can only be removed from our board or [his executive] positions by the vote of Class B holders.” In other words, he’ll be unfireable.
Musk has earned a $54,080 salary every year since 2019. A real man of the people! (The IPO is expected to push the richest person in the universe into trillionaire status.)
SpaceX is reportedly seeking as much as $75 billion from investors, and in making its pitch, the company writes, “The current paradigm, in which human civilization is confined to one planet, exposes humanity to existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale. By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.”
Fresh off beating back Musk’s $134 billion lawsuit earlier this week, OpenAI CEO and tech rival Sam Altman is reportedly full steam ahead on his company’s own IPO. While the “timing remains fluid,” according to Axios, “news of the planned filing … seems timed to take some shine off the imminent IPO unveiling by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.”
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