SpaceX Reports $18.7bn Revenue and $4.9bn Loss Ahead of Record-Breaking IPO
For more than two decades, SpaceX has been Silicon Valley’s most closely guarded balance sheet, a privately held empire of reusable rockets and orbiting broadband terminals whose numbers have been the subject of hot speculation but never confirmed.
On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s space and satellite team finally pulled back the curtain, and figures suggest the company is spending astronomical amounts to chase an even bigger prize.
In a prospectus filed in preparation for what could be the biggest stock market launch in history, SpaceX revealed revenue of $18.7bn (£14.7bn) by 2025, a 33 per cent jump on the previous year. But the headline numbers also revealed the cost of Mr Musk’s ambitions. The Hawthorn-based group swung to a loss of more than $4.9bn, compared to a profit of $791m in 2024, as capital spending almost doubled to $20.7bn from $11.2bn last year. The biggest increase, the company said, was included in the development of artificial intelligence, the production of satellites and the construction of its Starship program.
The disclosure, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, marks the first time the world’s most valuable private business has been forced to disclose its performance. According to filings reviewed by CNBC, SpaceX values itself at $1.25 trillion and will float as soon as next month, aiming to raise between $50bn and $75bn – a sum that could dwarf Saudi Aramco’s record $29bn in 2019.
To City watchers, the prospectus reads like a study in frontier capitalism: strong top-line growth fueled by equity burning. Starlink, the satellite broadband arm that now serves several million subscribers worldwide and is fast becoming a hotspot in rural Britain, has driven much of the revenue growth. Launch services, including contracts for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Pentagon, contributed to the remainder. But the cost of staying ahead of rivals like Jeff Bezos’s Project Kuiper is rarely high. As we reported in October, bankers have been quietly penciling in prices of up to $1.75tn once retail investors are accounted for.
The team’s reach now extends beyond rocketry. Following the acquisitions earlier this year of xAI, the artificial intelligence business behind the Grok chatbot, and the social media platform X, SpaceX has become something approaching the summit of Mr. Trump’s pet projects. The integration costs of that combination help explain the red swing, but they also underscore the strategic bet at the heart of the float: that rockets, satellites and large language models are turning into a single, vertically integrated infrastructure game.
A successful startup would ensure that Mr Musk, already the world’s richest person, crosses the threshold to become his first billionaire. It will also enrich many Wall Street institutions and long-time employees who have held paper money locked up for the better part of a decade.
The flotation, if it goes ahead as planned, looks set to open a pipeline of major listings that have been tight since the 2021 boom. Cerebras, the California-based smart chip designer, launched what bankers billed as a production window last week, closing 68 percent above its initial public offering price on the Nasdaq and ranking as the biggest tech offering since Uber went public in 2019.
For all the excitement, the prospectus also shows the risks associated with placing a company of this profile in public hands. SpaceX’s fortunes are tied unusually to a single founder, whose attention is divided between a dozen and whose political pronouncements sometimes displease customers and regulators alike. The $20bn-plus annual expenditure is not easily reduced when the development of Starship and the next-generation Starlink constellation depend on it. And the change in the company’s profits will give a break to fund managers who are weighing a punt of billions of dollars in stocks with limited room for valuation expansion.
Mr Musk and a spokesman for SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. Whether public market investors have the company’s view of its value will be resolved in a matter of weeks. What can no longer be doubted is the measurement of numbers, and the courage to bet.
