SpaceX Heads for Record IPO After Losses and Space Leadership

The biggest initial public offering in history, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is set to begin today. The company plans to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.78 trillion, making it one of the world’s largest publicly traded companies on its first day of trading. Demand for the offering is at a record level, with orders running at twice the planned amount. Although a twofold demand is not unusual in many large IPOs, bankers and investors say that with SpaceX it is a particularly significant achievement, since this is, after all, the largest IPO ever. The success or failure of the offering will also set the tone for two other mega-IPOs planned for this year, Anthropic and OpenAI, which are expected to launch this fall. Calcalist maps the numbers behind SpaceX’s IPO, the company’s business, and how the market is expected to receive it.

The bottom line swings between profit and huge losses. SpaceX’s revenue is growing at impressive rates, but not at the pace expected of a company coming to market. In 2025, revenue rose 33.2% from 2024, after increasing 34.9% in 2024 from the year before. In other words, the company’s revenue growth is slowing, not accelerating. The bottom line is even more misleading: SpaceX went from a loss of $4.63 billion in 2023, to a profit of $791 million in 2024, and back to a loss of $4.94 billion last year. A surge in R&D expenses, up 150% year over year to $8.64 billion in 2025, explains the dramatic volatility in the bottom line.

The company also has significant capital expenditures in AI infrastructure and space. In 2025, its capital investments totaled $20.7 billion, of which $12.7 billion was for AI data centers such as Colossus and Colossus II. And like other companies in the sector, the scale of investment keeps growing. In the first quarter of 2026, AI infrastructure spending already reached $7.7 billion. These investments do not come without returns: Anthropic agreed to pay the company $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 in exchange for access to part of the computing power SpaceX is building. Last week, the company signed a similar agreement with Google, worth $920 million a month, through mid-2029.

From satellites and AI to connectivity, SpaceX’s space operations grew revenue by 7.64% last year to $4.09 billion, the slowest growth among the company’s divisions. That came alongside a shift from operating profit of $21 million in 2024 to a loss of $657 million. Its revenue is also less than $1 billion higher than the AI segment’s revenue, and in the company’s business mix, the space activity can be seen as marginal given its lower growth potential compared with the AI and connectivity divisions. However, its value is measured by more than revenue: the rockets from the space division launched the thousands of Starlink satellites, the company’s main revenue engine. They also sit at the heart of Musk’s ambitious, and possibly unrealistic, vision of building data centers in space, which could boost the AI business. In this context, the space segment is critical to the other two, even if on its own it does not generate significant revenue.

Artificial intelligence is responsible for the company’s greatest prestige and a large share of its valuation. It is built on xAI, which Musk merged into SpaceX and includes the social network X, formerly Twitter. In revenue terms it is the smallest segment, with revenue of $3.2 billion in 2025, reflecting annual growth of 22.2%, and it accounts for most of the losses, with an operating loss of $6.36 billion, up 307.1%. In addition, the company’s models are considered less advanced than those of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, and have not gained broad popularity beyond X’s relatively limited user base. Still, the AI infrastructure Musk built to support this activity could become a significant revenue source through sales of computing infrastructure to other companies, as the company is doing with Anthropic and Google.

The connectivity arm is the strongest in absolute terms and in growth, thanks to revenue from satellite internet provider Starlink. Last year it posted revenue of $11.39 billion, a sharp increase of 49.9% from the previous year, and operating profit of $4.42 billion, up 120.5%. In the first quarter of 2026, Starlink had 10.3 million paying subscribers, annual growth of 105%. It is currently the company’s leading revenue driver and what allows it to stay afloat while funding the massive investments needed to compete in AI.

A dream IPO could make Musk the first trillionaire in history, at least on paper. With nearly half of the company’s shares in his hands, an offering at the expected valuation could boost Musk’s net worth by several hundred billion dollars. But the more important issue is his control over the public company. Through a dual-class share structure, Musk retains 85% of the voting power in the company and effectively ensures that he will keep absolute control. That is an important warning sign for investors: they may be buying shares in a public company, but one that can be run like a one-man kingdom. How much of a risk that is depends on how much they trust Musk and his decision-making ability.