SpaceX’s IPO filing is filled with AI bets, Starship dreams, and Elon Musk at the center

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded 24 years ago by Elon Musk, has announced its IPO. Once the company goes public, Musk will serve as CEO, CTO, and chairman of the board.

The massive filing, published after markets closed on Wednesday, shows a company that has evolved beyond its initial quest to produce reusable rockets — although its long-term mission of creating multi-planetary species remains intact. SpaceX is now a technology group that works on satellites and artificial intelligence, and has become one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

When it goes public later this year on the Nasdaq, it will become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies. (Nvidia currently holds the crown with a market capitalization of $5.4 trillion.) SpaceX has chosen the ticker “SPCX” for the listing.

The regulatory filing, known as the S-1, provides the most vivid and financially illuminating public analysis of SpaceX’s business to date. This comes just weeks before what is expected to be the largest IPO ever, both in terms of potential funds raised (expected to be around $75 billion) and overall valuation (said to be $1.75 trillion). The book contains 36 pages of risk factors to SpaceX’s business, detailing the legal battles it faces following the acquisition of Musk’s artificial intelligence and social media companies — fights that SpaceX says will likely cost it $530 million.

Several key details have been reported in the weeks since SpaceX first filed a confidential copy of its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1. The company lost about $4.9 billion in 2025. It has revenues of more than $18 billion, as Reuters reported last month.

The filing details a business currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet offering, which generated more than half of the company’s revenue last year — about $11 billion. It also shows how much SpaceX has spent to get to this point: It has lost more than $37 billion since its inception, according to the S-1.

XAI, the artificial intelligence company created by Elon Musk and recently merged into SpaceX, is no help on this front. The filing shows that SpaceX directed about 60% of its capital spending in 2025 to its artificial intelligence division, or about $20 billion. However, this division – which includes chatbot Grok – lost billions last year, and its revenues only grew about 22%. This is much lower than the revenue growth rates reported by frontier AI labs.

But the company, of course, makes a lot of astronomical promises in the registration process. One of the biggest? It “identified the largest total executable market in human history” at $28.5 trillion. The company attributes a large portion of that — $22.7 trillion — to “enterprise applications” of artificial intelligence.

It’s all about the rocket

Despite SpaceX’s complex business, much of its future is tied to the success of Starship, the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket that has undergone a series of explosions and technical renovations over the past several years. The company is expected to conduct its 12th Starship launch as early as this week, and much depends on its success.

SpaceX said in the filing that it expects Starship to begin delivering payload to orbit in the second half of 2026, leaving little room for error. Assuming SpaceX can achieve this feat, the company plans to start using Starship to send its broadband Starlink satellites into orbit in the second half of 2026 and its next generation V2 mobile satellites in 2027.

SpaceX’s plans for Starship extend beyond satellite launches. The company wants to use the rapidly reusable spacecraft, which is designed to deliver 100 metric tons to Earth orbit, to explore Mars and launch orbiting artificial intelligence data centers in space.

Pushing toward that goal has been costly for SpaceX, the S-1 filing shows. The company’s space segment has invested heavily in research and development for the Starship program, spending $3 billion in 2025 and $930 million in the first quarter of 2026.

The cost is worth it from SpaceX’s perspective. The company said Starship is critical to reducing the cost of getting to orbit by 99% or more compared to the average historical launch cost.

Star visions

The S-1 details SpaceX’s many extreme goals, such as making life multiplanetary, reaching the Moon and Mars, and building orbital networks of satellites that can do space computing.

But there are other flashy, futuristic ideas on file as well.

SpaceX is clearly still interested in using the Starship rocket as a ground transportation system — an idea first proposed by Musk in 2017. The company says it plans to “develop ultra-fast, long-distance point-to-point ground transportation 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 cautions this idea as a “future market,” so it’s nowhere in the picture in the near term. As a result, the benefits and risks of the idea of ​​point-to-point travel do not receive the same kind of scrutiny in filings as SpaceX’s core business.

Another “market of the future” listed is “space tourism.” SpaceX has addressed this in the past, allowing ordinary citizens to travel to space aboard its Dragon spacecraft. She also once planned a mission around the moon with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, but that was canceled long before it happened. In the filing, SpaceX says it expects “interest in human space travel to grow as space becomes easier and more common.”

SpaceX executives also believe the company will one day enable manufacturing facilities in orbit and on the Moon and Mars.

“We aim to establish in-space manufacturing facilities that take advantage of the unique microgravity conditions of space to produce advanced materials, medicines and components that are difficult or impossible to manufacture on Earth, opening up new, high-value industrial markets,” the filing said. Facilities on the Moon and Mars will focus on producing fuel, building materials and other “essential resources,” as well as producing solar energy.

Finally, SpaceX believes it may one day be involved in asteroid mining operations. Since it’s listed as another “future market,” there are few details on how SpaceX plans to address this idea.

Complete control

Make no mistake, this is Elon Musk’s company. According to the filing, Musk will be CEO, CTO and Chairman of SpaceX after the IPO.

The S-1 shows that he owns 93.6% of Class B shares in SpaceX, which comes out to 10 votes per share. Thus, Musk currently holds 85.1% of the voting power in SpaceX. This number is expected to decrease after the IPO, but will remain above 50%, allowing SpaceX to evade some rules related to having independent directors on its board.

He also received a new compensation package at the beginning of this year, which could amount to 1 billion shares of Class B stock if he succeeds in increasing SpaceX’s value to $7.5 trillion and “establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million people.” He’s willing to make more equity if the company is able to build space-based data centers capable of providing “100 terawatts of computing per year.”