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SpaceX Reveals Its Finances For the First Time (nytimes.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the drawing-back-the-curtains dept.
SpaceX has revealed its financials for the first time as it prepares for a potentially massive IPO. The New York Times reports: SpaceX's revenue soared to $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33 percent from a year earlier, the company disclosed in a filing required of firms that are seeking to go public. In the first three months of this year, revenue rose to $4.7 billion from $4.1 billion in the same period a year ago. But the company lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, as capital expenditures nearly doubled to $20.7 billion from heavy spending on artificial intelligence development. In the first three months of this year, SpaceX lost almost as much money as all of 2025, recording a $4.3 billion loss.

SpaceX Reveals Its Finances For the First Time More | Reply

SpaceX Reveals Its Finances For the First Time

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  • Investing = Polymarket betting (Score:3)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @07:23AM (#66153893)
    Pretty sure buying and selling shares in Spacex will ( for a few years ) be like placing Polymarket bets on the Success/Failure of launches.

    I hope we nerds can outguess the market !

    • Unfortunately not. The whole point of this story is that SpaceX looks like a reasonably sure bet on space and the military industrial complex (which wants/needs SpaceX's launch capability). However, in fact it's a bet on Elon Musk's ability to deliver AI this time, having failed already in Tesla and OpenAI. He's seemingly let his ego get ahead of himself and forgotten that Tesla, SpaceX and his other success were due to good engineers.

      • What does SpaceX have to do with AI?

        • Musk unloaded X's (twitter) failed AI experiment onto SpaceX. Part of this included a 220K node DC, which Anthropic recently announced they will be using.

        • In addition to the correct statement from @bad-badtz-maru, SpaceX has been pretty clear that Starlink is intended to eventually become a constellation of data-centers in addition to network access points.

      • That is the sad reality of the IPO. It is solely to fund xAI for the next decade. The space business will eventually be spun off in a bailout after absorbing all the debt from the Twitter acquisition and AI burn.

    • Re:Investing = Polymarket betting (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @09:47AM (#66154026)
      A publicly traded company whose main income is from the USA taxypayer. HINT: that is why they turned a profit last year, even though they were losing money every year before that.

      Yet again US taxpayers are propping up an oligarch instead of a public entity like NASA, where money was and still is, efficiently spent.
      Oligarchs started the "500 dollar hammer boondoggle" and the "pencil that could write in space" narratives to transfer public taxes to private Oligarchs. This is literally Russia.
      • Write about things you understand, if there are any.
        • Typical magat response. You can't refute the facts so you attack the poster. What a fucking loser.
          • Shit talking things you don't understand, then attacking the poster who called you out on it. What a fucking loser, twice.

          • If anything, it's the other way around -- SpaceX has been saving the government money just because of the fact that it greatly reduced the government's launch costs. To wit, if SpaceX decided to stop doing business with the government tomorrow, not only would the government lose access to the massive strategic asset that is starlink (if you don't believe it is, just ask Ukraine and/or Russia), but but the government would spend more taxpayer money on launch costs than it currently does by going with a compe

      • Re:Investing = Polymarket betting (Score:5, Insightful)

        by r1348 ( 2567295 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @10:05AM (#66154056)

        Yes, because it provides launch to orbit capabilities at a fraction of the cost of what NASA ever managed to achieve.
        When it comes to its space industry business alone, SpaceX is a big win for the American public, however it should be mandated to split its AI business off as it's basically parasiting those profits and turning them into a loss.

      • A publicly traded company whose main income is from the USA taxypayer. HINT: that is why they turned a profit last year, even though they were losing money every year before that.

        Yet again US taxpayers are propping up an oligarch instead of a public entity like NASA, where money was and still is, efficiently spent.

        Oligarchs started the "500 dollar hammer boondoggle" and the "pencil that could write in space" narratives to transfer public taxes to private Oligarchs. This is literally Russia.

        What are you smoking? NASA efficient in what way? NASA cost plus contracts are a national disgrace on overspending and waste

    • Perhaps, although what this filing shows is that they are actually losing money from their launch business, and all the profit is coming from Starlink.

  • Unfortunately we won't get a chance to invest in SpaceX.

    It will be an investment in Musk Inc and all the crap that goes along with it. SpaceX never needed to go public, it's all the other stuff Musk is getting the profitable SpaceX to drag along that will weigh it down. Will be a tough sell to get off the ground.

    • Re:No longer just SpaceX (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @07:36AM (#66153905) Journal
      Unfortunately, Musk and friends took that into account. They demanded, and received [etfstream.com] rule changes to get rammed into indexes as fast as possible. They'll certainly be happy to take direct purchases from any of the weirdos paying for blue checks on twitter; but the strategy is clearly intended to not require the bagholders to bite directly; instead hitting anyone with index exposure as rapidly and automatically as possible.

      • Re:No longer just SpaceX (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @07:56AM (#66153919)

        Personally, I've shifted to equal-weight ETFs. Yes, I missed out on the rise of the past 1,5 months - S&P has risen 1000 pts since end of March, but it just means that the value has gone up a bit less. If the bubble bursts, I expect the damage to also be a bit less.

        • The ones to watch are NANC (cute) and GOP. They follow exactly what congress members invest in.

        • One has to wonder what would if a not insignificant number of people called the company handling their mutual funds to escape. You have to wonder what the response would be at the index funds if money started being moved.

          Not that it's likely to happen - most people don't know how to move money from one fund to another... heck many don't even understand that they can move money to different funds.

        • I expect it will ripple across the rest of the economy much as the dot-coms did. My personal hedge has been to shift into income/value funds, such as FEQIX, which has been keeping up well with the S&P without such heavy AI exposure.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        It's possible to short SpaceX and hedge your ETF. If you really believe that this stock is going to be a stinker.

        I think a lot of this whining is just MDS (Musk Derangement Syndrome) due to his DOGE activity.

    • I wonder who, if anyone will really "invest". I can well imagine a lot of people will be looking to ride the share price changes, but who's going to *invest* for multiple years at a time?

      I ask because I'd imagine the first thing the collective shareholders will ask for is that the crappy bits of Musk Inc. get divested as quickly as possible. They're all going to be loss making - whatever notional value (say) Twitter has, it'll actually make way less than that when it gets sold off. None of that looks like a

      • Re:No longer just SpaceX (Score:5, Informative)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @08:52AM (#66153941) Journal
        Anyone who is hoping to avoid Musk's dumber ideas should probably just stay the hell away. Even by the standards of the classic "oh, there's actual-votes stock and peon stock; guess which kind we sold during the IPO" stuff; spacex is pushing things. The boy-king of mars holds 85% of the voting power; shareholders are required to waive the right to jury trial or class action and submit to arbitration only, only class B shareholders(mostly Musk) can remove the chairman of the board, CEO, or CTO; and similar enthusiastic use of Texas' provisions for 'controlled companies' that really don't want to take any pesky outside input.

        Putting your money on that is pretty much entirely just making a bet on whether you think the dictator for life will make line go up or not; not even pretending to be analogous to an ownership stake.

        • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

          by sabbede ( 2678435 )
          And the other side of that would be that people who want to cash in on his revolutionary ideas that change the world, should invest.
          • If they think it's worth it, on the balance, yeah. I'm not telling people where to put their money; or how to weigh the risk of Musk skimming the till on the actually-profitable rocketry in order to cover losses building mechahitler or trying to make orbital datacenters work.

            I was mostly responding to the "I ask because I'd imagine the first thing the collective shareholders will ask for is that the crappy bits of Musk Inc. get divested as quickly as possible." part of the above poster's post. This is 1
            • Is that novel? He's looking for investors, not partners, and he can offer up as much or as little of the company as he wants in the IPO. My superficial info says IPOs usually offer up around half the company but may only be 20%.
        • It's going to draw everyone into its maelstrom. This is a 1.7 trillion dollar investment scam. That's just too huge. It's going to come crashing down and it is engineered to come crashing down on our heads. The entire system and process sets up a too big to fail structure so that the government will inevitably bail out the big boys and let us flounder just like 2008 only worse.

          You really can't put your head in the sand anymore. But I don't see any will on the part of anyone to do anything else. So we're
      • Don't you mean, "buy now, sell in 5+ years"?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Onthax ( 1322089 )
        Looks like the IPO and share structure will have Musk having exclusive control

        Considering his past behaviour of walking all over retail investors, it's hard to see this going anywhere good.

        maybe one of the big activist investors can make this come good.

      • Index and hedge funds (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @10:07AM (#66154058)
        The IPO is so huge that if you are a institutional investor with one of those funds that buy stocks for people to invest in then you have to buy SpaceX. It's going to be something like 7% of NASDAQ. You can't afford for that to fail it would take down your other investments with it. It is classic too big to fail bullshit. It basically forces every single institutional investor to buy into it. The rule changes also Force those investors into it.

        This also means that if you're buying into supposably safe index or hedge funds you're now at risk because all of NASDAQ is at risk. This basically fucks everything up. It's too big of a scam for our economy to reliably absorb. Ordinarily the government would step in and block this shit because of the damage it would do to The wider economy. I don't think it takes a genius to figure out why that's not happening.

        • Just citing NASDAQ exaggerates things quite a bit. On IPO, Space X is going to have a market cap of around 1.5% of the S&P 500, but its public float is going to be way smaller than that (less than .25%). The market goes up and down 1% on a day to day basis without it being major news. Even a 2% day can happen without anything earthshattering. So SpaceX alone isn't jeopardizing the market if it goes bust.

          • I watched a tiny handful of savings and loan companies take down the entire country in the 1980s.

            The problem here is you can end up with cascading effects. You end up with a large investor who is stretched too thin on SpaceX stock and that takes them down and like a bunch of dominoes they take down somebody else and on and on and on.

            The market is currently drastically overvalued. And we have massively deregulated it so the hen house is full of foxes and the roof is about to come down.

            So yeah havi

  • >>But the company lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, as capital expenditures nearly doubled to $20.7 billion from heavy spending on artificial intelligence development.

    At first I assumed that this was because Musk merged xAI with SpaceX, but that didn't actually happen until 2026. Why was SpaceX spending so much on AI during 2025? Is this research for the bonkers data-centers-in-space nonsense?

    • So they can sell AI services to the government.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Onthax ( 1322089 )
      I expect since he controlled both companies and knew the acquisition was going to happen anyway, he shifted the financial burden to SpaceX
    • They need AI because it is one more thing they can grift—I mean sell. Just like SpaceX didn’t need $131M worth of Cybertruck. Musk however could not have it appear that the Cybertruck was a disaster. Technically he sold a lot of them . . . to other companies that he controls.

    • The xAI data is prorated in for financial comparisons, but (IIRC) only 12 months prior to acquisition.

  • And the SpaceX IPO is just a scam. There's simply aren't enough launch customers to justify the valuation and starlink can't make that up because they're only so many people in the world who can afford $100 a month for internet and don't have access to high quality wired internet. SpaceX is basically out of customers they are maxed out which is why they're pushing this now.

    NASDAQ where the shares get listed knows this but they're going to make so much money off of the launch of this IPO and the trading of the stock they couldn't say no. More importantly they let muskrat break and bend rules all over the place making this a extremely high risk investment unless you are part of the inner circle that will be protected. If you have less than a billion dollars in your bank account you are not part of that circle.

    Eventually all this bad stock is going to have to go somewhere. Traditionally it would go into public pensions but we've been using those to dump bad stock for so long there's no way they can absorb it. Over and over again we see rules around 401ks being changed. They're going to dump it into your 401k.

    Because you currently have a measure of control over your 401k I'm sure you're telling yourself that as a sophisticated investor you will avoid those traps and it's those other suckers who are going to get stuck with the bill.

    Now we're going to ignore the fact that the economy is heavily interconnected and when all those other suckers lose their money it will have effects on you. We're just going to pretend they all shoot themselves or something.

    Here's the thing there's a hierarchy of suckers. You are in that hierarchy with everybody else. It is a little harder to get to your money. It is not impossible for somebody who has a trillion dollars. Rules can be changed and more complex traps laid. And when you wake up one day and you have $0 in your bank account and investment accounts you're going to stop and ask yourself how could this happen but that's not going to get you your money back.

    I used to think the old farts around here would safely die before the shit hit the fan for them but Trump is moving things so fast so badly I don't think that's the case anymore. And with AI data centers basically doubling the price of electricity and water the shit's going to hit the fan all at once. So unless you are planning on dying before the midterm elections I don't think you're going to escape this shit.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      simply aren't enough launch customers to justify the valuation and starlink can't make that up because they're only so many people in the world who can afford $100 a month for internet and don't have access to high quality wired internet.

      Militaries and wealthy people in bombed-out areas seems to be a growing customer base. Invady McTintface and Bibi McZionbribe are leading the way.

      That being said, it's stupid to try to be both an AI company and a space company. Split focus like that has rarely worked well

    • It is a scam, but the launch and Starlink portions aren't it. Launches can easily expand 10x, and Starlink has huge opportunities in backup service for residential and business, not to mention connected vehicles. Think of Starlink as an alternative to mobile phones.

  • It's interesting how revenues, and profits, from Starlink far outweigh that from their actual Space/Launch business.

    In 2025 Starlink made $12B in revenue, and a profit of $4B

    In 2025 Space made $4B in revenue, and LOST $0.6B

    As always with Musk, the real potential is described as what they MIGHT do, not what they are actually doing, with his X.ai failure seeming to do most of the heavy lifting (excuse the pun) there.

    In fact Musk embraces the pun and refers to their maxed out fanboy $300/mo Grok subscriptions

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