Musk has drawn plenty of criticism for his often unpredictable and impulsive behavior as the CEO of Tesla, and his running of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency was often detrimental to his own companies. However, under his leadership, SpaceX has also become one of the most valuable private companies in the world. “SpaceX, in 20 years, went from one of the most outlandish startups in the space industry, to the best company at everything in space—and I literally mean everything,” Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a financial research firm focused on the satellite and space industry, told TMD. “Their rockets are better than everyone else. Their satellites are better than everyone else. And their user terminals.”
The numbers back up Henry’s claims. In 2025, SpaceX flew 165 missions using its Falcon 9 rocket—roughly 52 percent of all orbital launches on the planet. Its reusable boosters have landed successfully more than 600 times—a feat that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, its closest competitor, has managed only once. “Through any measurable metric you could possibly do for launch, SpaceX wins,” Kathleen Curlee, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TMD. “Revenue, mass, cost per kilogram—it just wins in every measure.”
That extends to national security. SpaceX is the sole U.S. provider of crew transport to the International Space Station and is a critical partner for military launches and satellite communications. “The United States is very fortunate to have SpaceX as an American company,” Curlee said. “They don’t have a viable competitor.”
But despite the cinematic spectacle of rocket boosters getting snatched out of the sky, the real engine of the business is Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service that uses satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide internet access across the globe. “Starlink is the cash cow of SpaceX today,” Henry said. “It has no equal.” Launched in 2019, the service now has 9.2 million subscribers across more than 150 countries, having doubled its user base every year for three consecutive years. According to a financial model published on March 2 by PitchBook, a financial data firm that tracks private companies, Starlink generated an estimated $10.6 billion in revenue in 2025, comprising roughly two-thirds of SpaceX’s total revenue.
According to Franco Granda, who designed PitchBook’s financial model for SpaceX, the key to the product’s success has been its vertical integration with SpaceX’s launch capabilities. “It’s a combination of two independent yet highly synergistic businesses,” Granda told TMD. As The Dispatch reported last year, LEO satellite constellations like Starlink require thousands of satellites to ensure reliable worldwide coverage, and SpaceX’s dominance as a launch operator makes it nearly impossible for competitors like Amazon’s Project Kuiper and Eutelsat OneWeb to keep up.
Granda anticipates that Starlink’s importance to SpaceX will only expand as the company launches additional satellites and builds out a highly anticipated direct-to-cell business, which will allow users to access Starlink’s satellite network directly from their cell phones without the use of a satellite dish.
That expanding telecom business, alongside SpaceX’s dominance of the launch market, are what’s fueling investor expectations that the company will go public at a 13-figure price tag. According to Granda’s PitchBook model, SpaceX’s IPO valuation could be as high as 94 times its 2025 revenue—a multiple that only one publicly traded company in America, Palantir, currently matches. “The median tech company has gone public at six or seven times annual revenue, and SpaceX is talking about 10 times that amount,” Ritter said.
The bull case for that sky-high valuation rests on SpaceX’s position in two enormous and fast growing markets “They essentially have the monopoly on launch services, and they’re the undisputed leader in satellite internet,” Granda said. Two growth drivers anchor that forward-looking valuation. The first is Starlink’s direct-to-cell service. “That has the potential to be huge,” Henry said. “You have, at least theoretically, an addressable market of several billion devices.” SpaceX spent $19.6 billion acquiring wireless spectrum from EchoStar last year to build that business out.
The second is Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, which can carry nearly nine times the payload of a Falcon 9 at a fraction of the cost. “With the Falcon 9, they revolutionized the entire industry,” Granda said. “But Starship is the next step forward.” Starship’s success would allow SpaceX to improve its gross margins on launches substantially while serving more customers with higher payload capacities.
Beyond those near-term catalysts, SpaceX is also betting on more speculative ventures including orbital data centers, a concept that would shift AI computing from Earth to space. The idea has drawn interest from several companies, including those backed by Bezos, but many in the space industry are skeptical that technological barriers can be easily overcome. “There’s massive concerns about, can they dissipate enough heat in space where there’s no air,” Henry said. “We’re just not there yet,” Curlee agreed.
Another SpaceX moonshot idea will actually take a shot at the moon: According to Musk, the company is prioritizing the development of a self-growing lunar city, with hopes that such a project could be achieved in the next decade. Granda’s PitchBook valuation, however, assigns zero revenue expectations to orbital data centers and lunar colonization—at least for now.
That valuation debate gets harder when you consider what SpaceX is actually bringing to public markets. It’s not just a rocket and satellite company anymore—the company’s merger with xAI, which previously absorbed X, Musk’s social media company, has folded in a debt-laden, cash-burning artificial intelligence startup. While the xAI business was valued at $230 billion in a January funding round, it is also estimated to be burning around $1 billion per month. “That is sort of like throwing a bobcat into what was previously a very tame and orderly environment,” Henry said. “It injects a tremendous amount of uncertainty into what otherwise was a very stable, hugely disruptive and impressively challenging to replicate business.”
The xAI deal marked a turning point in how Granda viewed the company. “Before this happened, I thought of [SpaceX] as a fantastic business, operationally speaking,” he said. “When you introduce xAI, there’s a lot of uncertainty—not only the fact that everyone is thinking of AI as this massive bubble, but also the fact that this is not the best AI company out there.”
SpaceX’s high revenue could now help subsidize xAI’s burn rate—and the deal also functions as a “rescue ladder” for investors who backed Musk’s Twitter takeover. Many of those investors had written down roughly 70 percent of their original investment. But now, through a chain of mergers—X into xAI, then xAI into SpaceX—those same investors now hold meaningful stakes in an entity heading toward a $1.75 trillion IPO. “You’re now part of this very large liquidity event where you’re likely to get a hefty premium over your $44 billion that you invested initially,” Granda said.
For years, the prevailing wisdom in finance held that the best technology companies no longer needed public markets. Companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe could raise billions privately, maintain tighter control of their ownership, and avoid the scrutiny that comes with quarterly earnings reports and public disclosure. But SpaceX’s IPO signals that, at least for some of the country’s largest private companies, that thesis is now breaking down—and the AI capital arms race is a big reason why. “There are still advantages to being public, and in general, the bigger the company, the more the benefits outweigh the costs,” Ritter said. One of those advantages, he explained, is the ability to raise capital more easily.
SpaceX’s own capital needs illustrate the point: The company’s $19.6 billion EchoStar spectrum deal alone exceeded the company’s entire 2025 revenue. The $50 billion SpaceX is projected to raise in an IPO could not only strengthen the company’s balance sheet following that acquisition, it could help fund further development of its Starship rocket, the buildout of its direct-to-cell business, and—if the vision holds—orbital data centers and a lunar base. “It has been amazing how much [SpaceX] has been able to raise—and OpenAI and some other companies have been able to raise massive amounts without going public,” Ritter said. “But the providers of that capital do want liquidity at some point, and the bigger the company is, the more the advantages of being public. And it looks like the company has crossed that threshold.”
Not everyone is optimistic about SpaceX’s growth potential after an IPO. “The valuation appears to me to be overhyped. I don’t know how people achieve these valuations without believing extraordinary things about SpaceX,” Henry said. “People are wagering on SpaceX growing by leaps and bounds in their current and future markets.”
Despite SpaceX operating as a genuinely extraordinary business, it is heading into the public markets bundled with a money-losing AI lab, a struggling social network, and a technically challenging vision for data centers in orbit. The IPO will be the biggest test yet of whether investors are pricing the company that exists today—or the empire Musk says he’s building. “It’s the case with all stocks, and especially young companies, that the most likely outcome is disappointment,” Ritter said. “Everything has to go right in order to justify that and have the company’s revenue and profits grow into that valuation. And it’s really hard for a company to have everything go right.”
But for Granda and Henry—analysts who have spent months building models and projections without the benefit of audited financial statements—the IPO offers something simpler that analyzing a private company never can: answers. “On a personal level,” Granda said, “I want to know how close I got to all the numbers.” Henry felt similarly. “There’s the forecast, and then there’s reality, and so we just want to know if we’re right or how close we are,” he said. “Every forecast is wrong, but we want to know how wrong we are.”
