SpaceX's historic IPO plans: Billions in losses and Musk's massive ownership

SpaceX sees a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, and said in its prospectus that identifying and creating trillion-dollar market opportunities is one element of its "repeatable business model."

The vast majority of its addressable market is outside of SpaceX's existing businesses. There's an $870 billion market for Starlink's broadband business, a $740 billion market for Starlink's mobile unit, a $600 billion digital advertising market for X to pursue and a $2.4 trillion AI infrastructure market.

Then there's enterprise applications, a $22.7 trillion market, based on an estimate from the Digital Cooperation Organization.

"We believe we are still in the early days of AI transforming enterprises, with AI-powered enterprise applications poised to reshape the digital economy," SpaceX said. The company said that with help from Tesla, it's developing an AI agent service called Macrohard that's meant to emulate digital work and create an AI-run software company.

— Jordan Novet

Advertising revenue from X, formerly known as Twitter, declined by $100 million in the first quarter, as the business dealt with the overhaul of its ad technology. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, renamed it X and then merged it with xAI, now part of SpaceX.

The advertising figures are a stark contrast to results from Meta, Pinterest and Reddit, which all recorded sales growth.

For the full year in 2025, ad revenue grew by $115 million after plummeting by $595 million in 2024, according to Wednesday's prospectus. Data licensing revenue has consistently grown.

Meanwhile, X has been working to sign up more paying subscribers. Between X and xAI's Grok assistant, subscription revenue increased by $365 million in 2025 and another $177 million in the first quarter of 2026.

X started to release its new Ads Manager in April. SpaceX says it expects to boost advertising revenue per user and bring in more advertisers.

— Jordan Novet

SpaceX revealed that it spent $131 million on Tesla Cybertrucks in 2025, purchased at the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

Those purchases followed a high number of voluntary recalls of Tesla's electric pickup trucks, due to safety issues and declining consumer interest.

SpaceX also said it bought $697 million worth of Tesla's Megapack battery energy storage systems in 2024 and 2025. Tesla previously disclosed the Megapack purchases by xAI.

—Lora Kolodny

Musk was awarded 1 billion performance-based restricted shares in January. But in order for them to vest, the company has to establish a "permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants," according to the prospectus.

SpaceX said the board approved the grant, and one piece of the performance is tied to "specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches." The other is related to Mars, which Musk has long said he wants to colonize.

Each vesting requires the meeting of a market cap milestone and "human colony milestone," and all are "subject to Mr. Musk's continued employment with us through the date on which achievement is certified by our board."

—Jennifer Elias

Most of SpaceX's $4.69 billion in first-quarter revenue came from Starlink.

The company breaks down its business into three units: Space, Connectivity and AI. Connectivity includes the Starlink satellite internet service, which is sold directly to consumers, as well as to government and military agencies.

According to the filing, Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue in the latest quarter, accounting for 69% of the total. The company now boasts about 10.3 million Starlink subscribers.

Connectivity is also the only profitable part of the company. The space business lost $619 million in the quarter on an operating basis, and AI unit lost $2.5 billion. Connectivity recorded a profit of $1.19 billion.

—Lora Kolodny

SpaceX has been ramping up spending on third-party cloud providers and on its own data centers.

Cost of revenue in the AI segment jumped 29% to $2.18 billion in 2025, due to infrastructure and cloud computing costs, according to the prospectus. The AI segment's research and development costs skyrocketed over 300% to $5.06 billion, led by $1.67 billion in higher graphics processing unit depreciation and $1.44 billion in higher infrastructure and cloud expenses.

The company has $25.45 billion in contractual commitments, including for cloud capacity. But 95% of the total is for 2026 and 2027.

— Jordan Novet

SpaceX made its case for why orbital data centers are a worthwhile investment, and said they're coming in a matter of years.

"We believe orbital AI compute is an incredibly difficult technical challenge that only we can solve at scale in the near term," SpaceX wrote in the filing.

Musk and other tech executives, including Jeff Bezos, have extolled the benefits of operating data centers in space, arguing they could prove to be cheaper and run off of plentiful solar energy compared to Earth-based facilities.

Experts argue space-based data centers may not be feasible anytime soon, due to launch costs, lifespan, heat management and exposure to extreme radiation. The systems are comprised of swarms of satellites equipped with GPUs and powered by solar photovoltaics.

SpaceX said its rocket launch business would allow it to "consistently activate the highest performing hardware" in orbit, faster than its competitors. Data centers in space could also bring down the cost of AI tokens, the company said.

SpaceX said it expects to begin deploying data centers in space "as early as 2028." The company is seeking regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission to launch up to 1 million satellites, which would function as a data center network in space to support AI projects.

— Annie Palmer

The filing lands just two days after Musk was handed a stinging defeat in his high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

An advisory jury said Monday that Musk, who first filed the suit in 2024, waited too long to bring claims that OpenAI, Altman and Greg Brockman, the company's president, went back on their vow to keep the company a nonprofit. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the jury's verdict.

Musk said in a post on X that the judge and jury "never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality."

The verdict followed three weeks of dramatic testimony in federal court in Oakland, California. Musk, Altman and Brockman all testified.

--Ashley Capoot

SpaceX said it employed over 22,000 full-time employees worldwide at the end of the first quarter, specifying that none "are subject to any collective bargaining agreement." Musk has long touted anti-union preferences, including Tesla, which has clashed with labor regulators and union organizers in Europe and the U.S. for years.

—Lora Kolodny

Antonio Gracias, CEO of Valor Equity Partners and a SpaceX board member, will have sizable control over SpaceX. Ahead of the IPO, the venture capitalist owned 503.4 million Class A shares, or 7.3% of the total.

SpaceX's xAI subsidiary leases equipment from Valor, worth over $20 billion in total. From January 2025 to February 2026, xAI has paid back $1.7 billion. Meanwhile, Valor paid SpaceX's X (formerly Twitter) $1 million in 2024 and another $1 million in 2025.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and operating chief, is the fifth-largest owner of Class A shares. She owns 7.1 million Class B shares, which have 10 times the voting power of Class A stock

Another beneficiary of SpaceX's IPO is Luke Nosek, a co-founder of Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. He has 33 million Class A shares.

— Jordan Novet

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's longtime president and operating chief, has played a key role at the company, helping build the business and sell its vision to NASA.

Shotwell joined SpaceX as vice president of business development shortly after the company's founding in 2002. She previously worked at rocket maker Microcosm and the Aerospace Corporation.

Over the past quarter century, Shotwell has developed a close relationship with Musk, who appointed her president of the company in 2008. Shotwell oversaw the company through its early Falcon rocket development and government contract work with NASA.

Shotwell has worked closely on the company's business strategy, including plans to eventually build a permanent base on Mars. An engineer by background, Shotwell graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree and master's degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.

According to Wednesday's filing, Shotwell's compensation totaled $85.8 million in 2025, with the vast majority coming from options awards. Her base salary was $1.08 million. SpaceX also said it "provides security equipment to enhance security at Ms. Shotwell's personal residence." That's included in $30,095 worth of other compensation.

Shotwell holds 5.46 million Class A and 7.1 million Class B shares ahead of the offering.

—Samantha Subin

OpenAI is mentioned twice in SpaceX's S-1.

The company is listed as one of SpaceX's "key competitors" in AI, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, open source model providers and social networks including Meta's Threads, Reddit, and TikTok.

OpenAI is also mentioned in a section of the filing that explains SpaceX's Grok AI models. SpaceX says its "accelerated development cadence positions Grok among the fastest-advancing frontier models relative to peers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn't named in the document.

--Ashley Capoot

SpaceX said capital expenditures in the first quarter totaled $10.1 billion, more than doubling from a year earlier. The vast majority of those costs — $7.7 billion — were for AI, with the rest spent on space and connectivity.

—Ari Levy

In April, SpaceX said it obtained the rights to buy coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for the work the companies are doing together. In Wednesday's filing, SpaceX elaborated, saying that it doesn't have an obligation to buy Cursor or pay a fee.

SpaceX would pay $60 billion worth of Class A stock to buy the company, the filing shows.

If the deal doesn't happen, Cursor can receive a $1.5 billion termination fee and a $8.5 billion deferred services fee, payable in cash, or Class A stock if SpaceX hasn't gone public by the time the fees become payable.

SpaceX can exercise a call option that would involve acquiring Cursor in the 30 days after Sept. 30, or after seven trading days after the IPO, whichever comes first.

As of Jan. 31, Cursor had $2.7 billion in cash and equivalents, with $550 million in liabilities, the filing shows.

— Jordan Novet

Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 as part of the compute deal the companies announced earlier this month, according to the filing.

The AI company will use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the companies announced previously. Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and also "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of capacity in space.

SpaceX said in its IPO filing that capacity will ramp in May and June of this year at a reduced fee. The agreement can be terminated by either company with 90 days of notice, the filing says.

--Ashley Capoot

SpaceX said revenue increased 15% to $4.69 billion in the first quarter from $4.07 billion a year earlier. Revenue for all of last year jumped 33% to $18.67 billion.

The company recorded a net loss in the latest quarter of $4.28 billion after losing $4.94 billion in 2025.

—Lora Kolodny

Musk controls 85% of SpaceX voting power, with 849.5 million Class A shares and 5.57 billion Class B shares, according to Wednesday's prospectus.

Other than Musk, no person or entity has a stake larger than 5%.

— Jordan Novet

Musk merged SpaceX with xAI in February, creating a combined entity that he valued at the time at $1.25 trillion.

Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle company, has a market cap of about $1.6 trillion, and was previously the main source of his liquid wealth.

In a statement announcing the SpaceX-xAI merger, Musk said the deal was meant to create "the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform."

But by April, Musk acknowledged that xAI, and the tech underlying its AI chatbot and image generator Grok, "was not built right first time around," and needed to be "rebuilt from the foundations up."

Grok was supposed to be xAI's answer to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, but has remained more of a niche player. Grok drew lawsuits and investigations in the U.S. and Europe after it enabled the widespread creation and sharing of nonconsensual explicit, deepfakes, which were based on photos and videos of real women and children.

As part of the SpaceX overhaul of xAI's business and technology, the company struck a deal last month to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. That transaction is expected to move ahead after SpaceX shares begin trading.

SpaceX would pay $60 billion worth of Class A stock to buy the company, its IPO filing shows. If the deal doesn't happen, Cursor can receive a $1.5 billion termination fee and a $8.5 billion deferred services fee, payable in cash, or Class A stock if SpaceX hasn't gone public by the time the fees become payable.

SpaceX is also acting as a so-called neocloud, renting out xAI's compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis to Anthropic.

—Lora Kolodny and Jordan Novet

SpaceX is based in Texas, along the Gulf Coast. In 2024, Musk said he was moving SpaceX's headquarters from Southern California to Boca Chica, Texas, where the company built and launched its rockets.

Last year, SpaceX was successful in converting Boca Chica into an official company town named Starbase through an election. Around 500 people, including SpaceX employees, lived in the community at the time, according to the Texas Tribune.

Starbase's official website describes the town as the "gateway to Mars," and "a launch site unlike any place on Earth, with humanity's future in space unfolding in plain view for the public."

Bobby Peden, who has spent roughly 13 years working for Musk's rocket maker, is the town's inaugural mayor after getting elected last May.

SpaceX is planning for a 12th test flight of its massive Starship rocket that will launch from a new pad at the Starbase facility as early as May 21.

"Development, manufacturing, testing, and launch of Starship currently takes place at Starbase, home to SpaceX headquarters and one of the world's first commercial spaceports designed for orbital missions," the prospectus says.

SpaceX is currently being investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after an unidentified worker died at a Starbase facility on May 15, as the San Antonio Express-News reported Monday. 

-- Lora Kolodny