SpaceX S-1

(sec.gov)

258 points by cachecow6 hours ago

30 comments

  • impulser_5 hours ago
    &quot;in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee&quot;<p>Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That&#x27;s more revenue than Starlink. In fact that&#x27;s their largest revenue stream lol.
    • kennethrc2 hours ago
      &gt; COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0064177" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0064177</a><p>It may be sick, but someone&#x27;s got a sense of humor over there :)
      • gclawes1 hour ago
        THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
        • sneak39 minutes ago
          REESTABLISH THE LINK OR ACTION WILL BE TAKEN<p>wickedly underrated film. my all time favorite in the skynet genre.<p>the vocoder speech at the end is just exquisite.
    • chvid2 hours ago
      As far as I can Google the colossus data centers did cost about 7-10 and 18 B respectively.<p>Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.
      • BoredPositron1 hour ago
        It&#x27;s really not.
        • gekoxyz1 hour ago
          can you elaborate?
          • lumost1 hour ago
            Napkin math on 5 year depreciation is 5.5 billion per year for 28 billion. However the 28 billion is cash upfront, spacex is probably paying 10-20% interest on the 28 billion for another 2-6 billion per year.<p>So net you are looking at finance expenses of 7-11 billion per year. The electricity costs will be significant on top of that, but harder to get a solid read on.<p>Net of everything, spacex <i>may</i> be getting a 14-28 percent yield before paying for electricity. After electricity&#x2F;insurance&#x2F;data&#x2F;taxes&#x2F;other expenses - I’d guess it’s anywhere between 0% and 7% yield.<p>Odds are good that Anthropic abandons the deal before the depreciation schedule completes. Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
            • bluecalm59 minutes ago
              That assumes they are renting out the whole capacity. Have you seen anything suggesting that&#x27;s the case?
              • tredre350 minutes ago
                Anthropic is renting the whole capacity (of one of the colossus), it was a big part of the announcement.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;anthropic-to-rent-all-ai-capacity-at-spacexs-colossus-data-center-180327774.html?guccounter=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;anthropic-to-rent-all-ai-capa...</a><p>I don&#x27;t know about Cursor.
    • cherioo1 hour ago
      It’s also interesting that Cursor (that spacex is acquiring ) also just announced yesterday they are training in colossus.<p>So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?
    • ykl5 hours ago
      At the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new?<p>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?
      • impulser_5 hours ago
        They are. This is from their &quot;Chief Compute Officer&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;nottombrown&#x2F;status&#x2F;2057194829986300375" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;nottombrown&#x2F;status&#x2F;2057194829986300375</a>
        • jprd4 hours ago
          Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?<p>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 &quot;bubble&quot;, I&#x27;m just going to say that&#x27;s so crazy.
          • gpm4 hours ago
            Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.
          • ACCount373 hours ago
            Colossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that&#x27;s fully operational.
            • dbalatero3 hours ago
              Then why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;naacp.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-data-center-power-plant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;naacp.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...</a>
              • ACCount373 hours ago
                Because they have two compute clusters? Colossus 1 and Colossus 2?<p>If your impression was that they went &quot;we&#x27;re done here&quot;, packed up and left, you&#x27;re wrong. They&#x27;re both operating and expanding their operations. And fighting environmental activists in court while at it.<p>Which I respect them for. &quot;Environmental activists&quot; are scum of the earth, as a rule, and &quot;pay some activists to sue your competition&quot; is a true time-honored classic of grey area legal warfare. SpaceX had to deal with that long before they merged with xAI - pretty much every time they built or expanded infrastructure.<p>Anyone can sue anyone for anything, and only the truly asinine lawsuits get thrown out pre-emptively, so &quot;getting sued by environmental activists&quot; is a more reliable indicator of &quot;they&#x27;re building something&quot; and &quot;they&#x27;re stepping on some bigwig&#x27;s toes&quot; than it is of any &quot;environmental damage&quot;. Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
                • dbalatero3 hours ago
                  Yes and both are getting sued? I wouldn&#x27;t necessarily classify the NAACP as environmental activists, but they are concerned with the wellbeing of the people they represent.
                • rafram39 minutes ago
                  &gt; &quot;Environmental activists&quot; are scum of the earth, as a rule<p>&gt; Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.<p>I suspect your definition of a lousy place to build infrastructure in might overlap with my definition of a relatively good place to live.
    • neosat5 hours ago
      has anyone done the math on: 1. cost to build out and run the data centers 2. cost of compute (hardware and energy) 3. depreciation of legacy GPU and thus value at the end of 3 years.<p>And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it&#x27;s mostly break even or if one of Anthropic&#x2F;SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.
      • chatmasta3 hours ago
        SpaceX is already indicating their strategy on this, because they’re renting their last-gen data center to Anthropic and keeping the current-gen data center for themselves. Rinse and repeat.
      • electriclove4 hours ago
        Maybe it is a win&#x2F;win. Anthropic gets desperately needed compute at a fair price. SpaceXAI sells compute at a fair price and gets desperately needed revenues.
      • impulser_5 hours ago
        Well Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s &amp; GB300s.<p>So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
        • denimnerd424 hours ago
          a GB300 rack is like 5-6 million so seems a bit low.
          • impulser_2 hours ago
            Yeah, maybe these aren&#x27;t good guesses. I was basing it off CapEx and Elon&#x27;s tweet about them. Maybe C2 isn&#x27;t completely filled yet.
      • treis4 hours ago
        It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.
      • jfkdkdkdk3 hours ago
        [dead]
    • etempleton2 hours ago
      The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.
      • dopa4236515 minutes ago
        The most honest memory cartel is reporting stupid profit numbers too!<p>&gt;Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;sustainability&#x2F;sustainable-finance-reporting&#x2F;samsung-elec-q1-profit-surges-eightfold-record-2026-04-30&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;sustainability&#x2F;sustainable-finance-r...</a><p>&gt;South Korean April exports rise 48.0% y&#x2F;y as chip boom extends<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia-pacific&#x2F;south-korea-april-exports-rise-480-yy-chip-boom-continues-2026-05-01&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia-pacific&#x2F;south-korea-april...</a><p>To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.
      • btian2 hours ago
        How is SpaceX not making money?<p>Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.<p>Anthropic is also profitable now.
        • etempleton1 hour ago
          Anthropic is not profitable and does not expect to be revenue even until 2028. They are just losing less billions per year than everyone else.
          • theptip1 hour ago
            As always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit.<p>By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.
            • fooblaster33 minutes ago
              how exactly can you assume they have unit profitability
              • theptip15 minutes ago
                Plenty of analysis on this point, the inputs are not secret. Check out Semianalysis for example.<p>They have something like 70% margin on inference.
      • kurthr2 hours ago
        Except that they&#x27;re loaning a bunch of money to their &quot;customers&quot; to &quot;buy&quot; their products. It&#x27;s still really circular.
        • etempleton2 hours ago
          This thing is going to explode. From this I have to imagine OpenAIs numbers are also going to be much worse than people imagine &#x2F; what has been shared.
    • LarsDu885 hours ago
      Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.
      • nolta4 hours ago
        Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
        • electriclove4 hours ago
          Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don&#x27;t need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
    • keeda4 hours ago
      Whoa. I&#x27;ve said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view.<p>While Altman got laughed out of the room as a &quot;podcasting bro&quot; asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario&#x27;s part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better.<p>This won&#x27;t hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won&#x27;t look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.
      • sdwr2 hours ago
        They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.
        • stingraycharles2 hours ago
          Being drowned in demand and scrambling for compute because you’re more successful than anticipated is a better problem than the other way around.
          • keeda31 minutes ago
            Oh, for sure it could be much worse -- they could have been in xAI&#x27;s place! ;-)<p>But while this is a &quot;good problem to have&quot; it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable.<p>Now, I&#x27;m totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!<p>Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it <i>would</i> have been better to drink his own Kool Aid!<p>Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.
      • s2cdd2 hours ago
        Lmao wtf. Based on this post I can clearly see you&#x27;ve never properly understood what balance sheets are and how they are created.<p>Stop posting stuff you have ZERO clue about.
        • keeda28 minutes ago
          That&#x27;s fair, I&#x27;m not a finance person, just meant to say that this is costing them way more than they would have liked at a critical stage in their corporate evolution. I&#x27;m curious though what your take is.
    • baron8165 hours ago
      Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.
      • nickff4 hours ago
        The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don&#x27;t have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.
        • kube-system4 hours ago
          They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I&#x27;m glad they didn&#x27;t die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn&#x27;t help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
          • keeda3 hours ago
            And when Anthropic runs Claude on Allbirds&#x27; GPUs they&#x27;ll give it a SOLE.md.
          • aaronbrethorst4 hours ago
            I see what you did there.
    • gjsman-10005 hours ago
      $45 billion for a 3 year <i>rental</i>.
      • TheAlchemist5 hours ago
        What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.
        • jsnell5 hours ago
          The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
        • pianoben4 hours ago
          Nobody pays MSRP at that scale
          • eightysixfour4 hours ago
            Given global demand and that they were late to the order party, they probably paid more lol
        • btian5 hours ago
          Closer to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.
          • tristanj3 hours ago
            More like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.
        • pbmango5 hours ago
          Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.<p>Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
          • TheAlchemist5 hours ago
            The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
          • gjsman-10005 hours ago
            ... and a sign Anthropic couldn&#x27;t find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.
      • thetrb5 hours ago
        how much did SpaceX &#x2F; xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they&#x27;ll probably be mostly deprecated.
        • electriclove4 hours ago
          Are GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?
          • 3eb7988a16638 minutes ago
            I thought I saw a report from someone at Google saying that they were still running 7+ year old hardware because of demand. Even if it is not state of the art, if it generates more than the electricity costs, keep it running until it dies.
        • moogly4 hours ago
          And how many of them were diverted from Tesla?
          • electriclove4 hours ago
            Pretty sure that Tesla didn&#x27;t use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.
            • moogly1 hour ago
              Tesla famously never got to use them <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;2024&#x2F;06&#x2F;elon-musk-is-diverting-teslas-gpus-to-x-xai-nvidia-emails-say&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;2024&#x2F;06&#x2F;elon-musk-is-diverting-...</a>
  • Johnny_Bonk0 minutes ago
    Anthropic, you mean the supply chain risk anthropic as so brightly conveyed by petey
  • Eldodi6 hours ago
    Crazy this company will IPO for &gt;1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets.<p>2025:<p>- Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024<p>- Operating loss: -$2.6B<p>- Net loss: -$4.9B<p>- Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B<p>- Operating cash flow: $6.8B<p>- Capex: $20.7B<p>Segment breakdown:<p>- Starlink &#x2F; Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B adj. EBITDA<p>- Space &#x2F; launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss<p>- AI &#x2F; xAI &#x2F; X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss<p>Starlink metrics:<p>- Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026<p>- ARPU: $99&#x2F;month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026<p>Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026:<p>- Cash: $15.9B<p>- Marketable securities: $7.8B<p>- Total assets: $102.1B<p>- Total liabilities: $60.5B<p>- Debt &#x2F; finance leases: about $30.3B
    • runako6 hours ago
      The numbers overall are worse than I expected. I can&#x27;t believe Serious People are talking about putting this in the market at a trilly.<p>&gt; Starlink seems to be a real cash machine<p>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.
      • amluto2 hours ago
        The use of EBITDA for Starlink is also interesting. For something like terrestrial fiber, I can imagine thinking that there’s a lot of depreciation on the books, but that most of the equipment keeps working after the depreciation period or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy, and that the right of ways and attachments don’t really depreciate. But Starlink satellites are actually gone at the end of their useful life.<p>I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down.
      • aeternum3 hours ago
        Looks like it&#x27;s gonna be closer to 2 trilly
        • abirch2 hours ago
          When do we call AI bubble? Like 2 trillion value and losing billions.
      • huevosabio2 hours ago
        The space launch operating loss is like 10% of the Starlink operating income.<p>So Starlink is a cash cow!
      • Analemma_5 hours ago
        I can&#x27;t believe that my index funds are going to be looted to pay for this turd.
        • thephyber4 hours ago
          We can thank Nasdaq for lowering the standards to fast track SpaceX into an index with only having 5% float. Soon after it lists on the major indexes, we are gonna have some turbulence.
      • maipen5 hours ago
        As if any of the marketcaps actualy reflect a company&#x27;s true value. It&#x27;s never just about financials.
    • jfengel5 hours ago
      That&#x27;s kind of the whole point of a stock market. If you already had a solid revenue stream, you wouldn&#x27;t need investment.<p>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&#x27;re making a similar assertion for hardware: &quot;fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)&quot;.<p>The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It&#x27;s a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
      • kentm4 hours ago
        &gt; The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It&#x27;s a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.<p>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.<p>Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn&#x27;t roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he&#x27;s most passionate about.
        • jerlam1 hour ago
          Raising the market cap of Tesla is one of the requirements for Musk&#x27;s nearly $1 trillion pay package. Merging companies is a lot easier than trying to sell more cars or non-existent robots.
      • yibg2 hours ago
        These numbers would be ridiculous even for a software play. &lt; 20B in revenue at almost 2T valuation? That&#x27;s almost 100x revenue multiples at a not so great revenue growth rate.
      • electriclove4 hours ago
        There were talks in the past about spinning Starlink out. Perhaps the thinking that led them to keep Starlink in is the same thinking about their new data center business (what they got from xAI and will grow in orbit in the future)
      • stainablesteel4 hours ago
        putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s different
    • Rebelgecko2 hours ago
      Spacex has been playing fuckfuck games in recent months to boost their subscriber numbers.<p>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 &quot;free&quot; dishes, which a ton of people took them up on right before the price change
    • ACCount373 hours ago
      I&#x27;m surprised launch is only -$0.65B, given just how much were they sinking into launch infrastructure and R&amp;D for Starship.<p>Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile.
    • takinola1 hour ago
      Can someone ELI5 Starlink revenue sources? At the core, it&#x27;s an ISP (but served from space). What does Starlink have that differentiates from any other ISP? Is it because the TAM is global? That may be true at the margin, but I am sure most eligible subscribers would prefer a land-based system (eg no one in SF is cancelling their Xfinity to use Starlink) so how much is really left for them?
      • greycol26 minutes ago
        It&#x27;s because they&#x27;re good speeds in a lot of places that couldn&#x27;t get good speeds before. It&#x27;s also great for mobile work sites, i.e. construction sites, drilling camps, other b2b service businesses where a bunch of portacoms rock up to a site. Anywhere it&#x27;s mildly hilly you can&#x27;t actually assume you&#x27;ll get a signal outside of town but a satellite dish basically guarantees that. Even if you can guarantee your in a spot long term the upfront cost of fibre or a tower may not balance out as cheaper than just eating the higher bandwidth costs.<p>It&#x27;s also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn&#x27;t appealing for competitors to build out to, so there&#x27;s a lot of markets where it&#x27;s a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.
    • alopha5 hours ago
      Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it&#x27;s a money pit.
      • abirch2 hours ago
        SpaceX itself wouldn&#x27;t be that bad, it&#x27;s the xAI. It&#x27;s going to burn through cash.<p>I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: &quot;Great Product, Horrible Investment&quot;
    • JeremyNT4 hours ago
      What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds?
      • doctoboggan4 hours ago
        short it?
      • tobias34 hours ago
        Choose another index where it is not included?
        • Rury1 hour ago
          That alone will probably do little, due to contagion effects. Simply finding an index which excludes it might not be enough if it still shares other similar underlying stocks with indexes that do include it.
        • thephyber4 hours ago
          It’s so big that it’s going to swing the markets when insiders start to liquidate after it is listed and on some indexes.
    • porphyra5 hours ago
      It&#x27;s pretty much expected that a rapidly growing high tech company is gonna have a lot of losses and debt right? They&#x27;re just spending huge amounts of money on capex. Not doing so would be like floating minerals in Starcraft: symptomatic of bad macro.
    • moralestapia5 hours ago
      Typo: I&#x27;m sure you meant &gt;1T.<p>&gt;ARPU: $99&#x2F;month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026<p>Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase?<p>While I don&#x27;t think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...).
      • tristanj5 hours ago
        Starlink is giving away the satellite dishes for free to grow customers. These dishes are expensive to manufacture and cost the company hundreds of dollars each. The estimated manufacturing cost of a Starlink standard dish is around $400.
        • wmf5 hours ago
          That shouldn&#x27;t be included in ARPU.
        • fragmede5 hours ago
          Which is a fine thing to say, but CAC vs LTV (customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value of the customer) is the underlying equation. If it costs them $150 to give away a dish, but they get, say, $300 before the user churns, they still come out ahead.
          • golem142 hours ago
            By making a lot of antennae, they also lower their price in the future due to the learning curve.
      • boelboel5 hours ago
        They&#x27;ve been upping the subscription prices recently past few months.
    • jpkw5 hours ago
      Depreciation should be quite substantial - I recall reading that the starlink sats have a 5 year life expectancy?
    • Spartan-S634 hours ago
      If they cleaved off xAI and let it die, they&#x27;d be in much better shape!
      • electriclove4 hours ago
        Did you see that they are getting $15B&#x2F;year from Anthropic because of what xAI built?
      • redox994 hours ago
        xAI is by far their most profitable segment, receiving 1.25B a month from Anthropic.
        • lubos4 hours ago
          That 1.25B per month is not profit
          • redox993 hours ago
            Assuming renting their datacenters doesn&#x27;t cost them any more than running them for themselves, and plugging 15B a year of revenue (which ignores X entirely and other forms of revenue) you get 5.4B income, more than Starlink 4.4B income (which is slightly subsidized by the launch segment)
  • Jabbles5 hours ago
    If any company can put profitable data centers in space, it will be SpaceX. But I doubt that any company can. The difficulties of the physics and engineering of cooling seem like they will always outweigh the advantages of keeping your data center on Earth.<p>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.<p>I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;google-spacex-talks-explore-data-centers-orbit-wsj-reports-2026-05-12&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;google-spacex-talks-explore-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacenews.com&#x2F;anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orbital-data-center-satellites&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacenews.com&#x2F;anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...</a>
    • stanislavb2 hours ago
      This: &quot;I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.&quot;<p>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.
    • yibg2 hours ago
      The unit economics of orbital DC just doesn&#x27;t work with today&#x27;s technology. Assuming 0 ongoing OpEx(free energy), the launch cost of the satellite itself, along with solar panels, radiators as well as the chip themselves just doesn&#x27;t make sense given the ~5 year operational lifespan of both the chips and the satellites.
    • electriclove4 hours ago
      Wouldn&#x27;t your pension be buying shares at $2T?
    • hunterpayne53 minutes ago
      Wait until Elon learns what black body radiation is. A vacuum is an insulator, not a heat sink.
    • fragmede5 hours ago
      How do you price regulatory restrictions? The laws governing space are more lax than those governing how much chromium Tesla can dump into their waste water. By building in space, they get to completely sidestep any regulatory issues on Earth, like not being allowed to build what they want, wherever they want, how they want. It&#x27;s annoying getting permits to do whatever on my house, but for businesses, it&#x27;s a real problem.
      • darkwizard424 hours ago
        The biggest regulation of building in space is... where do the debris go. You are tightly monitored for how much trash reenters into the atmosphere, so there is still SOME level of regulation.
        • electriclove4 hours ago
          SpaceX is doing the monitoring and is making their system available to others for free: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;starlink.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;stargaze" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;starlink.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;stargaze</a>
    • stainablesteel4 hours ago
      elon has a great wall of china&#x27;s worth of plaques with comments exactly like this, and his companies are still worth more than their combined weight in gold
  • arthurofbabylon5 hours ago
    It’s surprising just how low the revenue is for SpaceX. There are some 700+ companies with larger revenue figures, and yet just a small handful exceed SpaceX’s proposed valuation.<p>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?).
    • dmix4 hours ago
      Uber had about $11B revenue when it went public<p>SpaceX is at $18.7B
      • darkwizard424 hours ago
        Just to keep things in perspective, Uber IPO-ed for 82.4B. SpaceX is IPOing for over 10x more.
        • dmix4 hours ago
          Plus Uber&#x27;s only increased their revenue 11-&gt;14B in the last 5yrs. SpaceX has added +$4B since 2024 and have fanciful plans in multiple markets that only a gambler like Musk would risk proposing.
          • urams2 hours ago
            &gt; Plus Uber&#x27;s only increased their revenue 11-&gt;14B in the last 5yrs.<p>This is just incredibly off. A brief look at Yahoo Finance shows revenue has grown from $31.9B in 2022 -&gt; $53.7B in trailing 12mos.
            • dmix1 hour ago
              you&#x27;re right, looks I mixed up some numbers while googling. their revenue went from 11-&gt;53b in 6yrs which was very off from my original comment<p>Which honestly surprises me, Uber was called a VC pump and dump scheme for years on HN before their IPO. Maybe that&#x27;s the better lesson here (dont take financial advice from HN comments)
              • eightysixfour43 minutes ago
                Personally, I always underestimate how much exploitation consumers are willing to experience before leaving a brand. I thought Facebook was reaching the peak of its ability to shove ads into its products in like 2011, boy was I wrong.<p>Uber successfully displaced most of the alternatives, slowly raised rates, and maintained operating margin while their fixed costs didn&#x27;t have to scale as much. Post Travis they&#x27;ve, financially, nailed it.
      • neosat2 hours ago
        Revenue is not the right metric when you compare space trips to trips inside a city. The more relevant numbers are EBITDA, Operating cash flow, Profits.
  • kentm5 hours ago
    SpaceX is incredibly exciting, but I was skeptical when XAI and Twitter were rolled into it. The S-1 here makes it even more disappointing.<p>I did want a piece of SpaceX but the valuation here is pretty eye watering compared to the fundamentals. I don&#x27;t think I can put my money into this, although I suspect it will still do gangbusters based on hype and momentum.<p>Its also a real shame that SpaceX&#x27;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&#x27;re achieving right now.
    • etempleton2 hours ago
      SpaceX would be an interesting IPO without XAI. It is hemorrhaging money and is in what, 6th place in the AI race while hemorrhaging X subscribers every month. Theoretically the company could focus on what is profitable and be strong fundamental company, but this is Elon we are talking about he is going to do whatever he wants to do.
      • kentm2 hours ago
        To be honest, it could be one with XAi too. Im no fan of Musk and Grok but the deal with Anthropic pointed out by other contributors isn&#x27;t nothing. And I don&#x27;t think SpaceX losing money at this stage isn&#x27;t quite the problem that people think it is -- as someone who as worked at companies losing money and then going on to make quite a bit. Revenue growth <i>is</i> there.<p>The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T <i>now</i>. 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&#x27;t want to pay for future performance now, you want it to be discounted because you&#x27;re taking on the risk that those things don&#x27;t happen. $2T feels like expecting that story has already been actualized.
        • etempleton2 hours ago
          The deal with Anthropic gives me more pause about the whole market. More circular spending. They are all propping each other up making it look like they have more revenue than they really have. I think Open AIs S-1 will be just as crazy. I don&#x27;t think there is any rationality or plan to all of this. AI doesn&#x27;t pay for itself. It won&#x27;t for a very long time.
          • eightysixfour39 minutes ago
            Anthropic showed operating profit (NOT profit) this quarter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;ai&#x2F;mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;ai&#x2F;mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...</a><p>Demand is there, money is coming in to these companies from customers. It isn&#x27;t <i>all</i> circular.
          • atonse36 minutes ago
            Not really, this seems to be a very traditional &quot;we need more cores, captain!&quot; and &quot;here&#x27;s a datacenter with cores&quot; rental.<p>Anthropic has grown 80x this year (according to their CEO). They are probably desperate to buy more inference compute for things like Claude Code, not for future investments. In the mean time, Grok seems to not have enough traction to utilize all the spare compute xAI has built with Colossus I and II.<p>This is one of those cases that shows that Elon is exceptionally better at atoms than he seems to be on the software side.
    • bmau54 hours ago
      You&#x27;ll get a piece regardless if you&#x27;re in index funds, as they&#x27;re being strong-armed into buying at this awful price
      • ericd1 hour ago
        I think this only applies currently for the Nasdaq index, and the only Nasdaq index fund that comes to mind is QQQ. I think fewer people are currently being hit than are worried about it.
      • sethops13 hours ago
        They aren&#x27;t being strong-armed, NASDAQ is literally changing the rules to appease Musk and get in on the grift. Move your money elsewhere while you still can.
      • kentm3 hours ago
        Its unfortunate that its being fast tracked and I&#x27;m really annoyed that NASDAQ is doing this. But I think that the impact should be relatively minimal, at least for the funds I hold. I really just find the transparent grift annoying.
    • electriclove4 hours ago
      Hopefully their competitors will keep advancing but that just reinforces that how hard space is and that SpaceX is doing things no one else currently can.
  • TheAlchemist6 hours ago
    Finally ! Can we end the debate about how mind blowingly profitable this company is ?<p>Mind you, those numbers don&#x27;t take into account YET the Twitter debt &#x2F; xAI merger burden - which will run into tens of billions per year.<p>I just can&#x27;t, can&#x27;t wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
    • inemesitaffia2 hours ago
      &gt;those numbers don&#x27;t take into account YET the Twitter debt &#x2F; xAI merger burden<p>Clearly untrue. Given that&#x27;s the source of the reported steep losses
      • TheAlchemist48 minutes ago
        How so ? xAI &#x2F; Twitter were merged in this year - they don&#x27;t show up anywhere in the financials.
    • peder1 hour ago
      Bruh. This is unhinged.<p>SpaceX is a good company with a ton of potential future revenue on their data center and Starlink businesses. Nothing about this company is fugazzi.
    • vardump5 hours ago
      &gt; I just can&#x27;t, can&#x27;t wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.<p>Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
      • malfist3 hours ago
        Spacex is not too big to fail.
        • Imustaskforhelp1 hour ago
          Yes but only if its added before the index funds. Let&#x27;s just hope that the nasdaq and the other markets just don&#x27;t take spacex (Nasdaq is literally bending its rules to accodomate SpaceX)<p>The worst thing is that we don&#x27;t even have a say in all of this and chances are most likely that its gonna IPO and get listed on the index funds soon and once it gets into Index funds, a lot of collateral damage might happen.<p>I must say that I am not quite optimistic about there not existing collateral damage, there is happening a lot of corruption within financial markets in general with bending laws. The worst part is that we all would&#x2F;might be the most impacted by it all
      • TheAlchemist5 hours ago
        So be it. What&#x27;s the alternative ? Continue a bubble ? Ride on the &#x27;FSD by the end of the year&#x27; or &#x27;thousands of Optimus next year&#x27; for the next 10 years ?<p>The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he&#x27;s not cooking the books ?<p>Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It&#x27;s just a matter of time until it unfolds.
        • aipatselarom5 hours ago
          SpaceX and Tesla are different companies, fyi.
          • TheAlchemist5 hours ago
            I know. They are very closely collaborating and are part of the same &#x27;empire&#x27;. They will also go down together.
        • LanceJones4 hours ago
          The idea that 100s of global pension funds don&#x27;t do their due diligence when investing 100s of millions or billions of their members&#x27; future retirement funds is extremely naive. With sincerity, I hope you can find a way not to be so emotional about what Musk says and be more grounded in what his companies and their employees are <i>doing</i>.
          • eightysixfour3 hours ago
            Have you ever heard of a Mortgage Backed Security?
            • jaggederest3 hours ago
              or Bespoke Tranche Opportunity, they don&#x27;t say CDO any more. I mean, it&#x27;s the same thing, but still.
          • tensor3 hours ago
            Investing in SpaceX is one thing. Investing in SpaceX that is now merged with several other failed companies that each incur massive yearly additional losses.... let&#x27;s see how long those funds still hold SpaceX.
            • ericd1 hour ago
              Isn&#x27;t xAI profitable after leasing out its DCs to Anthropic?
      • moralestapia5 hours ago
        &gt;The collateral damage would be mind boggling.<p>Nah.<p>Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI&#x27;s offerings.
        • thephyber3 hours ago
          Arguably Ukraine is still alive because of StarLink.<p>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.
        • oskarkk5 hours ago
          NASA mostly runs on SpaceX, so it depends if you consider ISS to be critical. But I wouldn&#x27;t say it would be mind boggling.
          • well_ackshually4 hours ago
            Cool, nationalise SpaceX, reintegrate its costs into NASA, done.<p>The US would never let its access to space be cut off.
            • hersko3 hours ago
              The US actually did just that when it retired the shuttle program. We had to rely on Russia to get to the space station.
            • adampunk3 hours ago
              Watch lmao.
  • SimianSci5 hours ago
    They make some incredibly outlandish claims over their total addressable market, one can only wonder where $26 trillion dollars in expected AI revenue would even come from, with 22T of that being from &quot;enterprise&quot; when they have no real products yet.<p>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.
  • Geeek6 hours ago
    Their stated TAM is bonkers. A total of $28.5 trillion: $370B Space, $1.6T Connectivity, $26.5T in AI. With AI becoming more and more commoditized, the AI number is insane.
    • LarsDu885 hours ago
      With these kind of made up numbers, they might as well have simply used the fucking Kardeshev scale.<p>Just compute the energy output of the Sun and claim they&#x27;ll build a Dyson sphere around it.<p>Can charge a nice hefty subscription fee for using the Sun, just like Netflix.
      • kentm4 hours ago
        Kardashev Type II is mentioned three times in the doc.<p>&gt; 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.<p>To be fair, he&#x27;s not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.
      • fragmede4 hours ago
        Shhh, that&#x27;s SpaceX&#x27;s real play. Put a giant sun shade between the Earth and the sun, and make everyone on Earth pay for sunlight. No pay? No crops. No food. Solves global warming.
        • dbalatero2 hours ago
          Damn, another Simpsons already did that with Mr. Burns&#x27; sun blocker.
          • MPSimmons1 hour ago
            &quot;Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.&quot;
    • seattle_spring5 hours ago
      That number is grossly inflated for every S-1. It&#x27;s about as close to meaningless as you could possibly get.<p>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.
    • tonyhart75 hours ago
      well if they talking future when US gov print money at unbelievable rate then this is very plausible (especially if they can work on space mining)
  • datadrivenangel5 hours ago
    So this confirms that SpaceX was making a lot of cash and plowing it back into R&amp;D, and that the X&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;xAI merger is concrete shoes on the good parts.
    • electriclove4 hours ago
      Did you read that Anthropic is paying them $15B&#x2F;year for use of xAI&#x27;s data centers? That changes things quite a bit
      • austhrow7434 hours ago
        Does xAI have some sort of edge over Anthropic when it comes to buying future compute?<p>If not, this just seems like grok not being as successful as they would have liked and then finding some other use for the compute they had bought for it while at the same time Anthropic can’t keep up with demand for claude.
        • electriclove3 hours ago
          Your second statement is correct IMO.<p>Re your first statement, the problem is that there isn&#x27;t enough compute out there. xAI built their own data centers (and plan to built more -&gt; in orbit). I don&#x27;t think Anthropic has done that to the same extent and it seems like they will partner with multiple vendors who can provide the compute they need.
      • datadrivenangel1 hour ago
        And SpaceX &#x2F;xAI spent almost $20 B over the last 3 years on &quot;AI&quot; capex and has AI capex and operations costing $10B combined in Q1 2026...<p>Spending 40B to make $15B&#x2F;year is a decent investment actually if you can do it for more than ~3-5 years.
  • pu_pe5 hours ago
    148 mentions of &quot;rocket&quot;. 773 mentions of &quot; AI &quot;.
    • ggreer4 hours ago
      That&#x27;s because they use other terms like &quot;Falcon 9&#x2F;Heavy&quot;, &quot;Starship&quot;, &quot;Super Heavy&quot;, &quot;launch vehicle&#x2F;system&quot;, &quot;booster&quot;, &quot;upper&#x2F;lower stage&quot;, and &quot;spacecraft&quot;.
  • doener4 hours ago
    &quot;XAI, the artificial intelligence company Elon Musk created and recently merged into SpaceX, is not helping on that front. The filing shows SpaceX directed around 60% of its capital spending in 2025 to its AI division, or around $20 billion. And yet that division — which houses the chatbot Grok — lost billions last year, and only grew revenue by about 22%. That’s far below the reported revenue growth rates at frontier AI labs.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-arrived&#x2F;?utm_source=dlvr.it&amp;utm_medium=mastodon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-...</a>
  • big_toast4 hours ago
    &quot;Mr. Musk or his affiliates may become aware, from time to time, of certain business opportunities ... and may direct such opportunities to other businesses in which they have invested.&quot;<p>&quot;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&quot;<p>Pg. 56<p>I think this part is interesting considering Tesla shareholders seem to have lost out on developing (x)AI (AGI?) internally.
  • robofanatic54 minutes ago
    How will this affect TSLA share holders? Will the value go up or down?
  • iandanforth1 hour ago
    This is Elon trying to be the first trillionaire and make investors whole by suckering the public.
  • nemothekid5 hours ago
    Am I reading this right?<p>SpaceX TAM - &quot;Enterprise AI Applications&quot; is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. This is a rocket company pretending it&#x27;s a frontier AI lab.
  • throw0101c5 hours ago
    Now that the paperwork is out, can anyone confirm this earlier report &quot;Report: SpaceX IPO gives Musk unchecked power and forbids investor lawsuits&quot;:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2026&#x2F;05&#x2F;report-spacex-ipo-gives-musk-unchecked-power-and-forbids-investor-lawsuits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2026&#x2F;05&#x2F;report-spacex-ip...</a>
  • inemesitaffia2 hours ago
    Remove Grok and it&#x27;s a great business.<p>Remove AI and it&#x27;s a good business.
  • htrp4 hours ago
    wow x.ai is a literal money incinerator
  • tristanj4 hours ago
    Elon Musk owns 12.3% of Class A shares and 93.6% of Class B shares. Class B shares have 10x the voting power of class A shares. Overall Elon controls 85.1% of the voting power in the company. If Elon sells any of his Class B shares, they automatically convert into Class A shares.<p>Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.<p>&gt; <i>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.</i>
    • quickthrowman4 hours ago
      The S&amp;P 500 index criteria didn’t allow this sort of nonsense starting in 2017, but they relaxed the rule again to allow dual class listings to be included in the index in 2023.<p>Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
  • einrealist5 hours ago
    &quot;We do not anticipate declaring or paying any cash dividends to holders of our common stock in the foreseeable future.&quot;<p>Sounds like &#x27;never&#x27; to me.
    • kentm2 hours ago
      Growth companies not paying dividends is normal and they&#x27;re likely many years out from when they&#x27;d need to seriously consider it. I don&#x27;t think thats a big deal.
    • wmf4 hours ago
      Because dividends are considered failure for tech companies.
    • neosat5 hours ago
      [flagged]
  • big_toast4 hours ago
    Is there any risk to SpaceX that the Musk brand pulls the market cap too far ahead now?<p>It&#x27;s not a risk factor I see in the prospectus but seems plausible to me.<p>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&#x27;s precedent in the dot com bubble. Certainly people were able to sell before the dip a la Cuban and broadcast.com. But I&#x27;m thinking more more specifically inducing competitive space ventures.
  • gigatexal4 hours ago
    Who is gonna buy at the IPO and why or why not? (Assumes you read the S1).<p>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.<p>I think he finds a way to trade inflated SpaceX stock to o buy Tesla and call it a day.
  • pastel87393 hours ago
    &gt; For instance, Mr. Musk currently serves as Technoking and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla<p>Sorry, what?
    • HerbManic3 hours ago
      Yeah... he gave himself that title back in 2021.
  • throw0101c5 hours ago
    Perhaps related:<p>* &quot;SpaceX IPO Scandal&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47388640">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47388640</a><p>* &quot;SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47648226">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47648226</a>
  • k2xl3 hours ago
    Very surprised to see SpaceX valued higher than OpenAI.
    • hersko3 hours ago
      They launched more mass to space than every other entity on planet earth combined last year.
  • bigbuppo5 hours ago
    So, a significant amount of self-dealing, and Elon Musk has an 85.1% voting share in the company. That sounds like a really great thing. There is no sarcasm in that previous statement. None at all.
    • randallsquared5 hours ago
      One of the major reasons for fans of space exploration to be concerned about all this was the dilution of control that seemed inherent in an IPO, but since that seems to be fixed, I don&#x27;t hate the idea any more.
  • hnburnsy3 hours ago
    [flagged]