SpaceX’s $1.75tn Flotation: Key Takeaways from Prospectus

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has unveiled plans for a highly anticipated $1.75tn (£1.3tn) initial public offering next month as he seeks investor backing for his quest to make life “multiplanetary”.

SpaceX is a sprawling enterprise, encompassing the rocket launch company, the Starlink satellite broadband service, Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence startup, and the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Details about these businesses and Musk’s ambitions were laid out in a flotation prospectus. Here are the main takeaways.

The entire business lost $4.9bn in 2025 on revenues of $18.7bn. Revenue grew by a third compared with 2024. Losses widened in the first quarter of 2025, with a $4.3bn loss compared to $528m in the same period last year.

The company is split into three segments: space (rocket launch business, clients include Nasa); connectivity (Starlink); and AI (xAI and X platform). Connectivity generated the most revenue at $11.4bn, followed by space at $4.1bn and AI at $3.2bn. Starlink was the only profitable segment in the first three months of this year.

The AI unit is heavily loss-making, losing $6.4bn last year, reflecting higher computing expenses such as building and operating the AI models for Musk’s Grok tool.

Capital expenditure totaled $20.7bn, with xAI accounting for $12.7bn, primarily due to building massive datacentres. SpaceX has built the Colossus datacentre.

The prospectus includes extraterrestrial aspirations not found in an average flotation document. The “future markets” section includes space tourism; energy production and manufacturing on the moon and Mars; and asteroid mining.

The prospectus acknowledges these markets “do not exist today”.

“While we believe these industries will develop over time, the manner in which they emerge, including the timing of commercialisation, the scale and pace of adoption, and the applicable competitive, technical, regulatory, geopolitical, and economic frameworks may differ materially from our current expectations,” the document states.

But it is classic Musk to aim for the impossible.

A more immediate ambition is datacentres in space, or “orbital compute,” powered by solar energy. The prospectus says it expects to launch extraterrestrial datacentres as soon as 2028.

The world’s richest person and chief executive of SpaceX will control just over 85% of the voting power in the business, making it extremely difficult to unseat him.

Musk’s control derives from majority ownership of class B stock, which carries 10 votes per share compared to class A stock. He will be very much in control.

Musk, already worth about $676bn – more than double his nearest rival, Oracle founder Larry Page – stands to make a vast sum from SpaceX, although the exact amount is unclear and there is a caveat to his maximum earnings.

According to the prospectus, he has been granted 1bn class B shares that vest if SpaceX achieves “establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” Additionally, he must meet market cap targets stretching to $7.5tn, more than the combined economic output of the UK and Italy.

Musk was granted another tranche of 302m B shares in March, vesting if he hits targets including completion of space-based datacentres delivering 100 terawatts of compute a year.

Musk’s base salary, unchanged since 2019, is $54,000 a year. He famously bid $54.20 a share for Twitter in 2022, leading to speculation he was referring to the slang term for cannabis, “420”.