American rocketry and satellite firm founded by Elon Musk. SpaceX has shunned the stockmarket for 23 years since its founding. It turned a profit for the first time in 2023 and is thought to be generating cash. In December 2025 a secondary share sale valued the company at $800bn. Reports surfaced in early 2026 that SpaceX was sounding out investment bankers about an initial public offering as soon as the following year at a valuation as high as $1.5trn. Together with OpenAI and Anthropic, the three firms have secured a total of nearly $120bn in private funding.
SpaceX is developing Starship, a reusable launch system with which it hopes to lift 150 tonnes to orbit on every flight—roughly double the payload of any rocket currently in operation. OpenAI has said it plans to invest perhaps $1.4trn in computing power over the coming years; if Anthropic wants to keep up, it too must splurge on data centres. SpaceX's own capital needs for Starship are likewise vast. Even as the trio's capital needs grow, the private market may stop expanding: after swelling at a compound rate of 10% a year between 2012 and 2021, global private assets under management have plateaued at just over $20trn.
SpaceX holds NASA's contract for the Human Landing System (HLS) for the Artemis programme. It plans to adapt the upper stage of Starship for the job—the craft will land upright on the Moon, like a 1950s comic-book rocket-ship. The HLS version will use most of its propellant getting off Earth and must be replenished in orbit with liquid methane and liquid oxygen carried up by other Starships—a technique never yet demonstrated. Leaked documents suggest a refuelling test is pencilled in for summer 2026, with an uncrewed Moon landing the following year.
Musk's obsession with Mars is the original cause of SpaceX's existence. In the late 1990s he was fascinated by the idea of growing a plant on Mars and sending pictures home, but discovered the launch costs would be prohibitive—so he created a space-launch business instead. Paul Wooster heads SpaceX's plans for Mars. With large ships and smallish crews, early missions will be able to take consumables along; SpaceX has not yet concentrated on the biological aspects of sustaining humans on the planet.
SpaceX's Starshield satellite network provides reconnaissance and communications for the American military. SpaceX is one of three "neo-primes"—alongside Palantir and Anduril—that are reshaping how America wages war. SpaceX has large contracts with commercial customers and other government departments, giving it greater scale than defence-only firms.
SpaceX was founded in a nondescript building in El Segundo, a beachside city near LAX. Its LA facility has since expanded to a factory-sized premises in nearby Hawthorne. The diaspora of ex-SpaceX employees forms the backbone of the "El Segundo defence-tech cluster" of hardware startups.
SpaceX's Starlink satellite-internet constellation had over 9,000 satellites in orbit and around 9m subscribers worldwide as of early 2026, more than triple the number two years earlier, with around a third in America. In 2025 SpaceX launched close to 4,000 satellites into space, accounting for about 85% of the global total. America conducted 180 orbital launches in 2025, of which SpaceX managed over 160. SpaceX can send objects into orbit far more cheaply than any competitor. The company reportedly generated as much as $16bn in revenue in 2025 and around $8bn in operating profit (before depreciation and amortisation).
On February 2nd 2026 Musk announced that SpaceX would merge with xAI, his artificial-intelligence lab. The transaction values the new entity at $1.25trn; SpaceX investors are entitled to 80%, with the remainder going to xAI's owners. The stated rationale is that the companies will work together to launch a fleet of data centres into space, giving xAI a big advantage in AI while furnishing SpaceX with a new line of business. SpaceX filed a request to the Federal Communications Commission to put a 1m-strong constellation of satellite-based data centres into orbit. Musk argued that within two to three years the cheapest place to provide computing capacity would be in space, by harnessing solar power undiminished by the atmosphere. In a study published in 2025, researchers at Google said the launch cost per kilogram was not likely to fall to a level equivalent to the cost of running terrestrial data centres for at least a decade. The merged company reportedly has plans to raise $50bn at a valuation of at least $1.5trn.
By April 2026 SpaceX was expected to list in the largest IPO of all time. The $75bn Musk reportedly seeks to raise, at a value for the company of up to $2trn, would be more than twice the amount raised in the next-largest offering, of shares in Saudi Aramco in 2019. Nasdaq has changed the rules on how quickly firms are included in its index to attract Musk to the exchange, and he has reportedly made early index inclusion a condition of gaining his favour. Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange are competing to win the listing.
On May 20th 2026 SpaceX filed the prospectus for an IPO worth about $75bn, targeting a NASDAQ debut in June. The target valuation is around $1.75trn—more than 90 times the $18.7bn in revenue the firm brought in in 2025. The IPO includes a five-to-one stock split, reducing the cost per share to appeal to retail investors. SpaceX's two-tier share structure makes Elon Musk effectively unremovable. Mr Musk's pay package depends on SpaceX's valuation rising to as much as $7.5trn; on the firm putting 100 terawatts of computing power into orbit (about 1,000 times the total of every data centre on Earth today); and on building a Martian city with at least a million inhabitants. The filings say AI makes up 93% of SpaceX's claimed "total addressable market" of $28.5trn. SpaceX's capital spending almost quintupled in 2025 compared with 2023, to more than $20bn. The firm is losing more than $1bn a month, much of it on xAI, which spent $8bn in the first quarter of 2026 and lost $6.4bn in 2025. Starlink alone brought in $4.4bn in operating profit in 2025; its revenue grew 50% between 2024 and 2025, from $7.6bn to $11.4bn.
In 2025 SpaceX charged $74m for a Falcon 9 flight, which can take 17.5 tonnes into orbit—about $4,200 per kg, about 85% less than incumbents such as United Launch Alliance (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) used to charge. Actual cost to SpaceX is thought to be around $1,000 a kilo. Starship aims to drive that down to $185 a kilo, partly by making payloads as big as 200 tonnes. Some Falcon 9 boosters have flown more than 20 times. SpaceX is building a pair of huge factories, dubbed "Gigabays", which Mr Musk hopes will produce hundreds of Starships a year. The firm spent $19.6bn in 2025 to acquire spectrum from EchoStar—more than a year of its revenues—to bolster Starlink's direct-to-cell business, and has sought authorisation to launch 15,000 specialised satellites. Tom Mueller, SpaceX's first-ever employee and the designer of its rocket engines, has since founded Impulse, another space firm.
Even before its IPO, SpaceX's fortunes ricochet through public markets. Tesla serves as a proxy: the pair share hardware, software and Musk himself. Alphabet owned 6% of SpaceX at the end of 2025; this investment, made in 2015, is a large part of the $107bn of private shares on Alphabet's balance-sheet. Blue Owl holds a chunk of SpaceX shares in one of its lending funds. Several listed companies, from EchoStar in America to Mirae in South Korea, have seen their share prices surge largely because of their SpaceX exposure.
The main headache of any listing would relate to corporate governance. Musk has had run-ins with regulators (who fined him and Tesla $20m apiece in 2018 for his remark on Twitter that he had "funding secured" to take the carmaker private) and judges. SpaceX is also reportedly part of a consortium, alongside Anduril and Palantir, bidding for Trump's "Golden Dome" missile-defence shield. SpaceX and xAI are said to be competing together in a Pentagon contest to build voice-activated drone-swarming technology.
Cynic, n.: Experienced.