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    SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought
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    SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought

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    47 Comments

    1. araujoms on

      That’s surprising. It’s widely known that X and xAI are miserable failures, but I expected SpaceX’s core business to more than compensate for that. Apparently not, they manage to lose billions of dollars while having the launch market pretty much for themselves.

    3. Duckbilling2 on

      if it were profitable it’d be worth less, that’s how it works these days .

    4. farcicaldolphin38 on

      Maybe they should go into the shoe business. I hear there’s a vacancy

    5. yoshinator13 on

      This point was striking to me.

      “SpaceX said that the AI unit containing X and xAI generated only $818 million in Q1 2026, about a third less than Twitter alone generated in the quarter before Musk took it over.”

      So Twitter revenue has dropped that much? Surely xAI has made some revenue of their own, meaning Twitter revenue is down more than 66% since the purchase.

    6. Palchez on

      Alternative headline: Noted Con-man’s businesses not as well run as we had you believe. 

    7. NotAnotherEmpire on

      Who is “everyone?” The valuation of SpaceX has long been whatever Musk declares it to be. 

    8. justbrowsinginpeace on

      Star link looks great because it has had a great headstart.and mountains of capital thrown at it with access to all the launch they needed. That advantage will finish over time

    9. tmobilehacked on

      “the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business.” you mean unlike Tesla’s $1.3 trillion valuation on $450M in Q1 profit? How can this surprise anyone?

    10. ktaktb on

      This filing is the catalyst for the bubble pop.

      If they somehow ipo this with these books for anywhere near 1.5T…lol

    11. walksonfourfeet on

      Good lord – why does everything have to have an X?

      “Space X CEO X Xman says X and xAI generated $X in reXenue in X1 and eXpect to increase by X% in X2. XXX!”

    12. PaleolithicLure on

      “Everyone” except anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to what that idiot Musk does.

    15. IntellectAndEnergy on

      This financial market desperately needed ways to lose massive amounts of money. It looks like SpaceX and AI will take the lead role. Thank You AI and SpaceX. Enjoy the ride!

    18. Nythoren on

      Until there are fundamental changes in how AI functions (decreasing processing needed for each little query), AI as a stand-alone offering may never been profitable for some of these companies. That’s why xAI had to be moved into SpaceX, so that the losses could be better absorbed. It’s why Sora was shut down. Why Gemini is being shovelwared into Google search, despite constantly hallucinating. Why OpenAI is still bleeding funding almost as quickly as it can secure investment. Why Facebook keeps having to fire waves of employees and shut down whole divisions to fund their AI ambitions.

      Companies that are buying AI products need it to be cheaper than how they function today. If using AI to develop code costs more than the Devs they’re firing, they won’t use it. So the AI providers need to keep their billing low despite their costs running high. Having a negative margin is obviously not sustainable, but they also need to be “early to market”, making it suicide to delay until costs decrease.

      They all need to find a way to decrease costs and increase monetization without scaring away their potential customers. Until those happen, AI is going to be a money pit instead of the cashcow the market believes it will be.

      We saw the same thing with the Internet Bubble. All these giant venture capital darlings that just couldn’t figure out how to go from idea to profitability. Eventually that bubble burst, the majority of companies went bankrupt when the funding dried up, and we were left with a handful of survivors. Expecting AI to be the same. The question will be, who will be the first major player to give up and realize their AI dreams are going to bankrupt their otherwise profitable companies?

    19. ICLazeru on

      So SpaceX, consists of three divisions. Space launch, communications, and AI.
      Of the three, only communications turned a profit, and not enough to offset the losses of the other 2 divisions, for a total operating loss of $5billion.

      The AI business also plans to start selling its own compute power to a rival AI company, which might be the right move but also basically signals surrender in the field of AI, meaning it is actually a compute rental division, and that probably has a very limited shelf-life as the actual AI companies it rents to build out their own proper computing capacity.

      I’m curious what this also means for Tesla, which Musk said was pivoting to be an AI company, but since the AI front is basically being surrendered, what is Tesla now with its cratering auto sales?

    20. GabeDef on

      If you keep up to date on the companies being rolled into the SpaceX umbrella, it’s understood the IPO is bundling three struggling companies with Starlink.

    21. nilssonen on

      Trillion dollar valuation on 18 billion in revenue with 5 in loses.

      A company sells 180 000 something for 100 that cost 125 but rumors has it they might be able to sell 18 millon something that cost 80. Is that correct or did I miss a 0 or two?

      It sounds insane.

      I can’t see SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all having a successful introduction to the stockmarket at more or less the same time?

    23. Free_Mousse2076 on

      Nothing Elon does is a behemoth except superb marketing and stock manipulation 

    26. mikebunchkin3727 on

      Oh look, space x going public so the ketamine addict, scam artist piece of shit can add more to his net worth. That’s all.

      It’s going to be another overhyped POS, that will have a P:E ratio that doesn’t make any sense.

    27. Blackout38 on

      Sounds like it’s exactly what investors thought it was. So there are a few more unprofitable business units, they can be sold off if they can’t be offset or profitable. Starlink is still the darling people think it is and starship has looked pretty good in its tests so its first successful manned flight will be a game changer in space. Data centers in space also has extreme potential and demand it seems.

    28. Zestyclose_Report526 on

      Looks like alot of his wealth is smoke and mirrors on paper. It’s just his companies pumping each other’s perceived value by being their own customers.  

      It’s like I write myself an IOU that say I owe myself 1 billion dollars. If I was an elite that would make me a billionaire. But since I’m not part of the elite, it just makes me a fucking idiot.

    29. ReidenLightman on

      Don’t include me in “Everyone”. I never thought highly of anything Musk touches. 

    30. The_Poop_Shooter on

      Elon musk is one of the most unlikable people on the planet. His name is poisoning the well for his businesses

    31. Significant-Branch22 on

      And it somehow won’t do anything to hold back its absurd expected market cap

    32. Catsrules on

      >reporting a $4.9 billion net loss

      I don’t mean to brag, but I made more money than Space X last year.

    33. g_bleezy on

      Jeez, I’m confused why this bozo wants to do away with the insider lockup timeline and just unload on retail investors as fast as this goes public?

    34. ohiotechie on

      Well next you’re gonna tell me that Musk fellow has a tendency to exaggerate and I know that’s not true. /s

    35. Electronic-Cat-1144 on

      They’re going to be very late to the moon. China’s plan is less ambitious, but they will get there first. China also has a plan for reusable rockets and they will get there. They don’t have a habit of making promises and not following through.

    36. hoodlumonprowl on

      Wow, I’m so surprised that this man child dork known-liar has propped all of this up on his own bravado. I, for one, hope all of this comes crashing down on top of him. It wont, I know, but man would it be sweet to watch it.

    38. 3eeve on

      The US economy operates solely on vibes now so I’m sure none of this actually matters

    39. Swimming-Tax-6087 on

      Can I just quote the mission statement from the S-1 for a moment:

      > 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.

      Oh, and this gem:

      > We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (“TAM”) in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

    41. Rattus_NorvegicUwUs on

      “You don’t get it… SpaceX is actually an AI company pretending to be a rocket company. But then xAI does the Twitter company, and grok is going to space. Anyways I think we should let the man throwing up nazi salutes be a trillionaire”

    42. tky on

      Analysts will read the offering, know it’s bad news, and still pile money into it as if subprime lending is back en vogue. And we’ll all be the ones holding the bag when it’s included in every retirement fund out there, no matter whether we want it or not. That’s the entire manipulative point of this plan.

    43. Calzinarzin on

      It is literally just shitty nasa. It’s always been shitty nasa. It’s never been a good company. Just take away the government grants and give that money to fucking NASA.

      Like fuck Trump. Fuck Biden. Fuck Obama. Fuck them all for privatizing space exploration.

    45. Idiot_Savant_13 on

      They’re a behemoth of a polluter, that’s for certain.

      I gotta get my car smogged while Ego Must gets to launch rockets for profit?

      Let’s talk quantity of contamination per person, shall we?

    46. re4ctor on

      you’re basically betting on space being a multi trillion dollar industry in the future. and that spacex will continue its dominant lead in cost per kilo, reusability, etc. neither of those things are guaranteed, especially in any near term time frame. over long enough horizons, i think its inevitable on the former and a solid maybe on the latter.

      but if the tam really is double digit trillions in the next decade or two, there’s going to be many many more companies vying for a slice as it becomes more realistic as truly attainable revenue and not just hypothetical. blue origin and rocket labs and others being a few years behind today won’t not matter as much in 15 years, and eventually the market will settle into homeostasis between various players. question is will spacex own 10%, 50%, 90% of that market? i think its likely they will owe much less than their near monopoly they have today, but enough to justify a very long hold on the investment until they are truly bringing in revenue into the trillions?

      for a highly speculative investment like this, i’d personally want 10x upside to justify the risk that it “all goes well over a 20 year period”, vs putting my money in safer more likely stocks (you can see 6x upside just from standard etf/sp500 style investing over 20 years). which means they need to be worth up to $20T in 20 years. or about 70% of the theoretical $28.5T market. that’s a BIG question mark.