SpaceX IPO filing shows AI bets, Starship dreams, and Musk at center

SpaceX, the aerospace giant Elon Musk founded 24 years ago, has finally revealed its IPO filing to the public. When the company lists on the Nasdaq later this year under the ticker “SPCX,” Musk will remain firmly in control as CEO, CTO, and Chairman of the board.

The hefty S-1 document, posted after markets closed Wednesday, paints a picture of a company that has evolved far beyond its original mission of building reusable rockets. While the long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planetary species remains intact, SpaceX is now a sprawling technology conglomerate with major bets on satellites and artificial intelligence. It ranks among the world’s most valuable private companies and is poised to become one of the most valuable publicly traded entities once it goes public. (For context, Nvidia currently leads all public companies with a market cap of $5.4 trillion.)

This regulatory filing offers the most vivid and financially detailed look at SpaceX’s operations ever made public. It arrives just weeks ahead of what is expected to be the largest IPO in history, with potential proceeds of roughly $75 billion and an overall valuation reportedly near $1.75 trillion. The document includes 36 pages of risk factors and details legal battles SpaceX faces after absorbing Musk’s artificial intelligence and social media companies, which the company says will likely cost it $530 million.

Many of the headline numbers have circulated since SpaceX first submitted a confidential S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1. The company lost approximately $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue exceeding $18 billion, as Reuters reported last month.

The filing reveals a business currently dominated by Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, which generated more than half of last year’s revenue, or about $11 billion. It also shows how much SpaceX has burned to reach this point: more than $37 billion in cumulative losses since inception.

xAI, the artificial intelligence company Musk created and recently merged into SpaceX, is not helping on the profitability front. According to the filing, SpaceX directed roughly 60% of its 2025 capital spending, or about $20 billion, to its AI division. That division, which houses the chatbot Grok, lost billions last year and grew revenue by only about 22%, far below the growth rates reported by leading frontier AI labs.

Still, the company makes audacious promises in the filing. One of the biggest claims is that it has “identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history,” valued at $28.5 trillion. SpaceX attributes an enormous chunk of that, $22.7 trillion, to “enterprise applications” of AI.

It’s all about the rocket

Despite SpaceX’s expanding portfolio, much of its future hinges on the success of Starship, the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket that has endured a series of explosions and technical overhauls over the past several years. The company expects to conduct the 12th Starship launch as early as this week, and a great deal is riding on its performance.

SpaceX stated in the filing that it expects Starship to begin delivering payloads to orbit in the second half of 2026, leaving little margin for error. Assuming that milestone is hit, the company plans to use Starship to launch its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit later that year and its next-generation V2 mobile satellites in 2027.

Beyond satellite launches, SpaceX envisions Starship enabling Mars exploration and launching orbital AI data centers into space. The spacecraft is designed to deliver 100 metric tons to Earth’s orbit.

Pushing toward that goal has been expensive. The space segment of SpaceX invested heavily in Starship research and development, spending $3 billion in 2025 and $930 million in the first quarter of 2026. But the company believes the cost is justified, arguing that Starship is critical to reducing the cost of reaching orbit by 99% or more relative to historical averages.

Starry-eyed visions

The S-1 details SpaceX’s many extreme goals, including making life multi-planetary, reaching the moon and Mars, and building orbital satellite networks for space-based computing. But it also includes some flashier, futuristic ideas.

SpaceX is apparently still interested in using Starship as a terrestrial transportation system, an idea Musk first proposed in 2017. The company says it plans to “develop ultra-fast long-haul point-to-point Earth transport using Starship, enabling passengers and cargo to travel between major cities in a fraction of current transit times, revolutionizing global logistics and passenger travel with unprecedented speed and efficiency.” The company caveats this as a “future market,” so it is not part of the near-term picture and receives less scrutiny in the filing than core business operations.

Another “future market” listed is space tourism. SpaceX has dabbled in this before, allowing private citizens to fly to space on its Dragon spacecraft. It once planned a mission around the moon with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, but that was canceled long before it could materialize. In the filing, SpaceX says it expects “increasing interest in human space travel as it becomes easier and more common to access space.”

SpaceX executives also believe the company will one day enable manufacturing facilities in orbit, on the moon, and on Mars. “We aim to establish in-space manufacturing facilities that leverage the unique microgravity conditions of space to produce materials, pharmaceuticals, and advanced components that are difficult or impossible to manufacture on Earth, opening new high-value industrial markets,” the filing reads. Facilities on the moon and Mars would focus on producing fuel, construction materials, and other essential resources, along with solar energy.

Finally, SpaceX believes it could eventually get involved in asteroid mining operations. As with other “future market” entries, there is little detail about how the company plans to tackle this idea.

Total control

Make no mistake, this is Elon Musk’s company. According to the filing, Musk will remain CEO, CTO, and Chairman of the SpaceX board after the IPO. The S-1 shows he owns 93.6% of SpaceX’s Class B stock, which carries 10 votes per share. That gives Musk 85.1% of the voting power at SpaceX. That number is expected to drop following the IPO but will stay above 50%, allowing SpaceX to avoid certain rules requiring independent directors on its board.

Musk was also awarded a new compensation package at the beginning of this year. It could net him as many as 1 billion shares of Class B stock if he increases SpaceX’s value to $7.5 trillion and achieves the “establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” He stands to reap even more shares if the company can create space-based data centers capable of delivering “100 terawatts of compute per year.”