SpaceX loses $37 billion, Starlink revenues dominate the satellite market

SpaceX's upcoming public release of its IPO prospectus will present a complex financial picture: the company's adjusted EBITDA last year reached $6.6 billion, but the net loss calculated under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) was as high as $4.9 billion, with historical cumulative losses reaching $37 billion.

This prospectus is expected to make SpaceX the largest IPO in history, with financing amounting to as much as $75 billion.

Unprecedented Scale of Cumulative Losses

According to the draft content of the prospectus obtained by The Information, SpaceX's cumulative losses as of the end of last year reached $37 billion, surpassing the sum of the same indicators for the ten technology companies that went public before, including Didi, Uber, Airbnb, and Rivian.

This figure reflects SpaceX's highly capital-intensive nature in the rocket launch business and the substantial equity incentive expenses accumulated over its 24-year history. The acquisition of xAI completed earlier this year — which also recorded significant losses last year — further exacerbated this situation.

The difference between the company's adjusted EBITDA and net loss is 1.7 times the adjusted profit, higher than that of data center operator CoreWeave, satellite internet provider Viasat, and even another company under Musk, Tesla.

Starlink Revenue Surpasses the Sum of Seven Major Competitors

Data from the prospectus shows that SpaceX's satellite internet business, Starlink, generated revenue of $11.4 billion last year, which is not only more than twice that of the closest competitor, Viasat, but also equivalent to the combined revenue of seven operators: SES, Viasat, AST SpaceMobile, Globalstar, Iridium, Eutelsat, and the satellite division of EchoStar.

In contrast, the growth of SpaceX's rocket launch business has been more moderate. Last year, the division's revenue only grew by 8% to $4.1 billion, mainly from contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA. In 165 Falcon 9 launch missions, over three-quarters served the company's internal Starlink deployment, with external customer launch volume and average launch price per mission remaining essentially flat compared to 2024.

xAI Growth Far Behind OpenAI and Anthropic

SpaceX's AI division integrates the social media platform X and xAI's Grok chatbot business, but its performance is not particularly impressive. Last year, xAI's revenue growth was only 23%, while Anthropic's growth exceeded 1000%, and OpenAI's growth was close to 300%.

The draft prospectus attributes xAI's growth to "an increase in subscription revenue, advertising, and platform service revenue," but does not disclose the respective revenue shares of the AI business and the X platform.

SpaceX is optimistic about its future development in the prospectus, stating that it is the "only company with a commercially viable path to build large-scale orbital AI computing infrastructure" and stating that it will transfer a significant amount of launch capacity currently allocated to Starlink to the AI business, launching servers into orbit.