SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk 24 years ago, finally published the filing of the public registration. And once the company goes public, Musk will be at the center of it as CEO, CTO and chairman of the board.
The hefty filing, released after markets closed Wednesday, shows a company that has grown far beyond its initial pursuit of reusable rockets — though its long-term mission to create a multiplanetary species remains intact. SpaceX is now a technology conglomerate working on satellites and artificial intelligence and has become one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
When it goes public on the Nasdaq later this year, it will become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies. (Nvidia currently holds the crown with a market cap of $5.4 trillion.) SpaceX chose the ticker “SPCX” for the listing.
The regulatory filing, known as an S-1, offers the most vivid and financially enlightening public analysis of SpaceX’s business to date. And it comes just weeks before what is expected to be the largest IPO ever, both in terms of potential money to be raised (expected to be around $75 billion) and total valuation (reportedly $1.75 trillion). It contains 36 pages of risk factors for SpaceX’s business and describes the legal battles it faces after absorbing Musk’s AI and social media companies — battles that SpaceX says will likely cost it $530 million.
Many of the title details were was mentioned in the weeks since SpaceX first filed a confidential version of its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 1. The company lost about $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue of more than $18 billion, according to Reuters was mentioned last month.
The filing describes a business currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink Internet satellite offering, which generated more than half of the company’s revenue last year — about $11 billion. It also shows how much SpaceX has burned to get to this point: more than $37 billion has been lost since the beginning, according to the S-1.
And xAI, the artificial intelligence company created by Elon Musk and recently merged into SpaceX, isn’t helping on that front. The filing shows that SpaceX directed about 60% of its capital spending in 2025 to its artificial intelligence division, or about $20 billion. And yet that division — which houses the Grok chatbot — lost billions last year and only grew revenue by about 22%. This is much lower than reported revenue growth rates in frontier AI labs.
But the company does, of course, make a lot of astronomical promises in the filing. One of the biggest? That it has “identified the largest total addressable market in human history” at $28.5 trillion. The company attributes a huge chunk of that — $22.7 trillion — to “business applications” of artificial intelligence.
It’s all about the rocket
Despite SpaceX’s complex operations, much of its future is tied to the success of Starship, the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket that has had a series of explosions and technical upgrades in recent years. The company is expected to conduct its 12th Starship launch as early as this week, and a lot is riding on its success.
SpaceX said in the filing that it expects Starship to begin delivering payloads to orbit in the second half of 2026, leaving little room for error. Assuming SpaceX can achieve this milestone, the company plans to begin using Starship to send its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit in the second half of 2026 and its next-generation V2 mobile satellites in 2027.
SpaceX’s plans for Starship extend far beyond satellite launches. The company wants to use the rapidly reusable spacecraft, which is designed to carry 100 metric tons into Earth orbit, to explore Mars and launch orbital AI data centers into space.
The push toward that goal has been costly for SpaceX, the S-1 filing shows. The company’s space division 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, in SpaceX’s view. The company said Starship is critical to reducing costs by reaching 99 percent or more of the historical average launch cost.
Starry eyed visions
The S-1 details SpaceX’s many extreme goals, including making life multiplanetary, reaching the Moon and Mars, and creating orbital networks of computing-capable satellites in space.
But there are other impressive, futuristic ideas included in the filing.
SpaceX is apparently still interested in using its Starship rocket as a ground transportation system — a Musk idea first proposed in 2017. The company says it plans to “develop ultra-fast long-distance point-to-point Earth transportation using Starship, allowing 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 near-term picture. As a result, the merits and risks of the idea of point-to-point travel are not examined in the filing in the same way as SpaceX’s core business.
Another ‘future market’ mentioned is ‘space tourism’. SpaceX has flirted with this in the past, allowing private citizens to fly into space on its Dragon spacecraft. He 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 “increasing interest in human space travel as access to space becomes easier and more common.”
SpaceX executives also believe the company will one day enable manufacturing facilities in orbit on both the moon and Mars.
“We aim to create space manufacturing facilities that take advantage of the unique microgravity conditions of space to produce materials, pharmaceuticals and advanced components that are difficult or impossible to manufacture on Earth, opening up new high-value industrial markets,” the filing says. The facilities on the moon and Mars will focus on the production of fuel, building materials and other “necessary resources”, along with the production of solar energy.
Finally, SpaceX believes it could one day get involved in asteroid mining operations. As it’s listed as another “market of the future,” there are few details on how SpaceX plans to address this concept.
Absolute control
Make no mistake, this is Elon Musk’s company. According to the filing, Musk will be the CEO, CTO and chairman of the board of SpaceX after the IPO.
The S-1 shows it owns 93.6% of SpaceX’s Class B stock, which comes with 10 votes per share. As such, Musk currently sits at 85.1% of the voting power at SpaceX. That number is expected to drop after the IPO, but will remain above 50%, allowing SpaceX to avoid some rules about having independent directors on its board.
He was also given a new compensation package earlier this year that could earn him up to 1 billion Class B shares if he increases SpaceX’s value to $7.5 trillion and “establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” It stands to gain even more share if the company is able to build space-based data centers capable of providing “100 terawatts of computing per year.”
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