SpaceX S-1
sec.gov131 points by cachecow 2 hours ago
131 points by cachecow 2 hours ago
"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee"
Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.
At the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new?
At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?
They are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer".
Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.
has anyone done the math on: 1. cost to build out and run the data centers 2. cost of compute (hardware and energy) 3. depreciation of legacy GPU and thus value at the end of 3 years.
And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.
It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.
Well Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s & GB300s.
So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.
The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.
They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.
Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
$45 billion for a 3 year rental.
What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.
The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.
how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.
And how many of them were diverted from Tesla?
Pretty sure that Tesla didn't use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.
Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets.
2025:
- Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024
- Operating loss: -$2.6B
- Net loss: -$4.9B
- Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B
- Operating cash flow: $6.8B
- Capex: $20.7B
Segment breakdown:
- Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B adj. EBITDA
- Space / launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss
- AI / xAI / X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss
Starlink metrics:
- Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026
- ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026:
- Cash: $15.9B
- Marketable securities: $7.8B
- Total assets: $102.1B
- Total liabilities: $60.5B
- Debt / finance leases: about $30.3B
The numbers overall are worse than I expected. I can't believe Serious People are talking about putting this in the market at a trilly.
> Starlink seems to be a real cash machine
It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink.
As if any of the marketcaps actualy reflect a company's true value. It's never just about financials.
I can't believe that my index funds are going to be looted to pay for this turd.
That's kind of the whole point of a stock market. If you already had a solid revenue stream, you wouldn't need investment.
These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)".
The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
> The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line.
Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about.
putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don't think it's different
What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds?
If they cleaved off xAI and let it die, they'd be in much better shape!
Did you see that they are getting $15B/year from Anthropic because of what xAI built?
xAI is by far their most profitable segment, receiving 1.25B a month from Anthropic.
It's pretty much expected that a rapidly growing high tech company is gonna have a lot of losses and debt right? They're just spending huge amounts of money on capex. Not doing so would be like floating minerals in Starcraft: symptomatic of bad macro.
Depreciation should be quite substantial - I recall reading that the starlink sats have a 5 year life expectancy?
Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it's a money pit.
Typo: I'm sure you meant >1T.
>ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase?
While I don't think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...).
Starlink is giving away the satellite dishes for free to grow customers. These dishes are expensive to manufacture and cost the company hundreds of dollars each.
Which is a fine thing to say, but CAC vs LTV (customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value of the customer) is the underlying equation. If it costs them $150 to give away a dish, but they get, say, $300 before the user churns, they still come out ahead.
If any company can put profitable data centers in space, it will be SpaceX. But I doubt that any company can. The difficulties of the physics and engineering of cooling seem like they will always outweigh the advantages of keeping your data center on Earth.
I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.
I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...
[2] https://spacenews.com/anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...
How do you price regulatory restrictions? The laws governing space are more lax than those governing how much chromium Tesla can dump into their waste water. By building in space, they get to completely sidestep any regulatory issues on Earth, like not being allowed to build what they want, wherever they want, how they want. It's annoying getting permits to do whatever on my house, but for businesses, it's a real problem.
The biggest regulation of building in space is... where do the debris go. You are tightly monitored for how much trash reenters into the atmosphere, so there is still SOME level of regulation.
SpaceX is doing the monitoring and is making their system available to others for free: https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
It’s surprising just how low the revenue is for SpaceX. There are some 700+ companies with larger revenue figures, and yet just a small handful exceed SpaceX’s proposed valuation.
In 2026 one gets the impression that SpaceX is a huge company, among the largest in the world. It’s wild to see that its business volume is smaller than Northrop, smaller than Apple’s peripherals alone, smaller than Avnet (heard of ‘em?).
Uber had about $11B revenue when it went public
SpaceX is at $18.7B
Just to keep things in perspective, Uber IPO-ed for 82.4B. SpaceX is IPOing for over 10x more.
Plus Uber's only increased their revenue 11->14B in the last 5yrs. SpaceX has added +$4B since 2024 and have fanciful plans in multiple markets that only a gambler like Musk would risk proposing.
SpaceX is incredibly exciting, but I was skeptical when XAI and Twitter were rolled into it. The S-1 here makes it even more disappointing.
I did want a piece of SpaceX but the valuation here is pretty eye watering compared to the fundamentals. I don't think I can put my money into this, although I suspect it will still do gangbusters based on hype and momentum.
Its also a real shame that SpaceX's competitors have not been able to get the same level of momentum. I know Starship has been delayed but its still hard to argue with total mass to orbit they're achieving right now.
Hopefully their competitors will keep advancing but that just reinforces that how hard space is and that SpaceX is doing things no one else currently can.
Finally ! Can we end the debate about how mind blowingly profitable this company is ?
Mind you, those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden - which will run into tens of billions per year.
I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
> I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
So be it. What's the alternative ? Continue a bubble ? Ride on the 'FSD by the end of the year' or 'thousands of Optimus next year' for the next 10 years ?
The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he's not cooking the books ?
Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It's just a matter of time until it unfolds.
SpaceX and Tesla are different companies, fyi.
I know. They are very closely collaborating and are part of the same 'empire'. They will also go down together.
>The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
Nah.
Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.
NASA mostly runs on SpaceX, so it depends if you consider ISS to be critical. But I wouldn't say it would be mind boggling.
148 mentions of "rocket". 773 mentions of " AI ".
That's because they use other terms like "Falcon 9/Heavy", "Starship", "Super Heavy", "launch vehicle/system", "booster", "upper/lower stage", and "spacecraft".
Their stated TAM is bonkers. A total of $28.5 trillion: $370B Space, $1.6T Connectivity, $26.5T in AI. With AI becoming more and more commoditized, the AI number is insane.
With these kind of made up numbers, they might as well have simply used the fucking Kardeshev scale.
Just compute the energy output of the Sun and claim they'll build a Dyson sphere around it.
Can charge a nice hefty subscription fee for using the Sun, just like Netflix.
Kardashev Type II is mentioned three times in the doc.
> We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.
To be fair, he's not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.
Shhh, that's SpaceX's real play. Put a giant sun shade between the Earth and the sun, and make everyone on Earth pay for sunlight. No pay? No crops. No food. Solves global warming.
That number is grossly inflated for every S-1. It's about as close to meaningless as you could possibly get.
For example, I used to work for an insurance-related tech company. They claimed their TAM was $9T-- the value of the entire global insurance market.
well if they talking future when US gov print money at unbelievable rate then this is very plausible (especially if they can work on space mining)
So this confirms that SpaceX was making a lot of cash and plowing it back into R&D, and that the X/Twitter/xAI merger is concrete shoes on the good parts.
Did you read that Anthropic is paying them $15B/year for use of xAI's data centers? That changes things quite a bit
They make some incredibly outlandish claims over their total addressable market, one can only wonder where $26 trillion dollars in expected AI revenue would even come from, with 22T of that being from "enterprise" when they have no real products yet.
The whole thing looks to be proped up by Starlink which seems to be a genuinely solid business. xAI looks to be costing twice as much as it produces, and we dont even have good numbers for this yet since the deal is so new. This feels like WeWork but if WeWork also owned a successful coffee shop.
Who is gonna buy at the IPO and why or why not? (Assumes you read the S1).
I did. I’m not buying. lol I won’t get an allocation but I also want to see where this shakes out. So in 6 months time if starlink is the gem that people say then sure.
I think he finds a way to trade inflated SpaceX stock to o buy Tesla and call it a day.
Elon Musk owns 12.3% of Class A shares and 93.6% of Class B shares. Class B shares have 10x the voting power of class A shares. Overall Elon controls 85.1% of the voting power in the company. If Elon sells any of his Class B shares, they automatically convert into Class A shares.
Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.
> Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.
The S&P 500 index criteria didn’t allow this sort of nonsense for a while but then they relaxed the rules :/
Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion.
"Mr. Musk or his affiliates may become aware, from time to time, of certain business opportunities ... and may direct such opportunities to other businesses in which they have invested."
"Under our charter, Mr. Musk and his affiliates are not restricted from owning assets or engaging in businesses that compete directly or indirectly with us"
Pg. 56
I think this part is interesting considering Tesla shareholders seem to have lost out on developing (x)AI (AGI?) internally.
Is there any risk to SpaceX that the Musk brand pulls the market cap too far ahead?
It's not a risk factor I see in the prospectus but seems plausible to me.
Just like with the AI company vesting, I imagine a scenario where a company seeds its own competition by realizing the monetary gains before the work is done. Maybe there's precedent in the dot com bubble. Certainly people were able to sell before the dip a la Cuban and broadcast.com. But I'm thinking more more specifically inducing competitive space ventures.
"We do not anticipate declaring or paying any cash dividends to holders of our common stock in the foreseeable future."
Sounds like 'never' to me.
Perhaps related:
* "SpaceX IPO Scandal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388640
* "SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648226
So, a significant amount of self-dealing, and Elon Musk has an 85.1% voting share in the company. That sounds like a really great thing. There is no sarcasm in that previous statement. None at all.
One of the major reasons for fans of space exploration to be concerned about all this was the dilution of control that seemed inherent in an IPO, but since that seems to be fixed, I don't hate the idea any more.
Am I reading this right?
SpaceX TAM - "Enterprise AI Applications" is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. This is a rocket company pretending it's a frontier AI lab.
Now that the paperwork is out, can anyone confirm this earlier report "Report: SpaceX IPO gives Musk unchecked power and forbids investor lawsuits":
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/report-spacex-ip...