10x the context. Half the time.
Speak your prompts into ChatGPT or Claude and get detailed, paste-ready input that actually gives you useful output. Wispr Flow captures what you'd cut when typing. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
SpaceX is about to go public in what will be the largest IPO in stock market history. The number being discussed is somewhere around 1.75 trillion dollars. Most of the coverage is about that number. Very little of it explains what you would actually be buying, or why a company that loses money is worth more than almost any company that makes money.
I find this story useful for a reason that has nothing to do with rockets. It is the cleanest live example I have seen in years of a question that every founder and every investor eventually has to answer. How do you put a value on a business where the part that makes money today is small, and the part that costs the most is a bet on tomorrow?
Let me walk through the SpaceX version first, because the facts are public now, and then get to why I think it matters far beyond SpaceX.
Three businesses, one engine
SpaceX runs three businesses, and they behave very differently.
The first is Starlink, the satellite internet service. This is the one that actually makes money. In 2025 it brought in about 11.4 billion dollars, which is roughly 61 percent of the company's total revenue, and it generated around 4.4 billion dollars in profit. It is a real, growing, recurring revenue business. Subscribers have gone from a few million a couple of years ago to over 10 million.
The second is the Space business. This is what most people picture when they think of SpaceX. It builds and flies the rockets, mostly for NASA and the US government. On its own the mature launch business is strong. But the segment loses money right now, because almost all of it is being poured into developing Starship, the next generation rocket. That is close to 3 billion dollars a year going into something that does not yet earn meaningful revenue.
The third is AI. This one arrived recently, when SpaceX folded in xAI, the company behind the Grok model and the social platform X (Twitter). This is the business that burns the most cash by a wide margin. It lost around 6 billion dollars in 2025 and is on pace to burn even more this year.
So when you read that SpaceX made 18.7 billion dollars in revenue, hold this picture in your head. One engine is pulling the whole train. Starlink makes the money. The other two are still in spending mode. Once you add the AI losses, the whole company actually posted a loss of around 4.9 billion dollars last year.
So why is it worth almost two trillion dollars
This is the part that confuses people, and it is the part worth slowing down on.
At that price, SpaceX would be valued at roughly 100 times its sales. For comparison, most large companies trade at a small fraction of that. A number like 100 times sales is not a statement about what the company earns. It is a statement about what investors believe the company will become.
Here is the honest way to think about it. Starlink alone justifies a real valuation, but a much smaller one than two trillion dollars. Everything stacked on top of that number is investors paying today for two bets about the future. The first is that Starship works at scale and makes launching things into space dramatically cheaper, which unlocks everything else. The second is the long shot idea of running AI data centers in space, powered by near constant sunlight.
In other words, you are not buying the profit. You are buying the promise. And the entire trillion dollar gap between what Starlink can justify and what the company is asking for is the price of that promise.
The risks, in the company's own words
The useful thing about a company going public is that it has to write down its own risks in plain language. SpaceX did. Three of them stand out.
Starship is listed as the number one risk. The company says directly that if it cannot develop and deploy Starship on schedule, or at all, its whole growth strategy is affected. This matters because nearly every part of the premium depends on Starship working. And it is not a sure thing. They had three Starship test failures in a row last year before recovering.
The AI business is the second. The filing admits that this segment is burning enormous amounts of cash, and that if it goes wrong it could pull the entire company into a cash crisis. So the AI bet is not simply a question of whether it pays off. It is disclosed as a potential threat to the whole business.
The third is control. After the IPO, this remains what is called a controlled company. One person - Elon Musk - keeps more than half the voting power, and outside shareholders get very little say in how the company is run. You would be buying into the vision, not into a vote on it.
The case for and the case against
The case for is straightforward. Musk has built category defining companies before, and has repeatedly made things work that serious people called impossible. Within SpaceX itself, both reusable rockets and Starlink worked and now generate real money. If you are betting on his ability to deliver an ambitious engineering project eventually, the history is genuinely impressive. And underneath all the noise, Starlink is a strong business in its own right.
The case against is just as straightforward. At 100 times sales, the price assumes almost flawless execution. And the one part of his track record that is genuinely weak is timing. The engineering tends to arrive. The schedule tends to slip, often by years. Full self driving, Mars timelines, product launches. The pattern is that the thing happens, but late. When you pay 100 times sales, you are paying for it to happen close to on time, and that is exactly the part of the record that is least reliable.
What I actually think, and why it matters to the rest of us
My honest take on SpaceX is that it is a great company at a stretched price on the first day. Those are two different things. A great business and a good entry point are not the same question, and a hyped first day of trading rarely answers the second one well. If you are genuinely tempted, read the company's own risk section before you read anyone's enthusiasm, including mine. None of this is financial advice, and I am not a financial advisor.
But here is why I bothered to write all of this down, and it is not really about whether you should buy the stock.
The shape of this story is one I see constantly, and one that anyone building or backing an ambitious company will recognise immediately. There is a part of the business that works and pays the bills. There is a part that costs a fortune and does not pay yet, because you are building infrastructure for a future you believe in. And the hardest question is how much that future is worth before it has arrived.
SpaceX is being rewarded for the unprofitable, future facing part of its business, not punished for it. Investors are handing it a trillion dollar premium precisely because of the bet, not in spite of it. That should be encouraging to anyone investing ahead of the curve.
But notice why SpaceX gets away with it. First, the profitable engine generates enough cash that the bet is a choice, not a matter of survival. Starlink funds the dream. Second, the company is precise about the gap between what is proven and what is speculative. The filing does not blur the line. It names the future bet as the single biggest risk, in plain words, and shows exactly how the cash engine covers it. Third, the people asking for trust have earned it before. Reusable rockets were dismissed as impossible until they worked. Starlink was dismissed as a money pit until it became the engine. Every previous bet that paid off is now collateral for the next one. Investors are not just pricing the plan, they are pricing the record of the people executing it.
That is the part most people get wrong when they tell their own version of this story for their companies. They either hide the burn, or they ask the future to be funded by faith alone. The companies that earn a premium for their future do the opposite. They are ruthlessly honest about which part of the business is real today and which part is a bet, and they show the path by which one pays for the other.
The lesson is not that burning money is fine if the dream is big enough. The lesson is that the market will pay for a credible future, but only when three things are true:
You are disciplined and honest about the present that funds it.
You are precise about which parts are proven and which are bets.
And you have a record of stewardship that makes your word worth something when the evidence runs out.
Clarity about where you are today, and a history of delivering what you said you would, is what earns you the right to be valued on where you are going.
That is true for a two trillion dollar rocket company. It is just as true for a business a tiny fraction of that size.
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
Do you have any specific personal, career or business challenges? Book a call with me; let’s discuss and see how I can help.
Subscribe to my emails if you haven’t to continue receiving content like this whenever I do write them.
Your docs are losing you deals you never knew you lost
Developers evaluate your docs before they evaluate your product. If your documentation is slow, incomplete, or hard to navigate, they move on — and you never see it in your CRM. Mintlify customers see measurable drops in support tickets, faster time-to-first-integration, and higher conversion from trial to paid. Zapier saw a 20% increase in docs traffic after switching. HubSpot cut engineering maintenance time in half. That's what documentation-as-infrastructure actually looks like.