Elon Musk burns cash like it’s nothing. Well. Okay. Mostly like it’s nothing.
SpaceX’s IPO filing reveals the numbers behind the chaos. In 2025, xAI lost $6.4 billion. On what, exactly? Just $3.2 billion in actual revenue. The hole is getting bigger, not smaller. In 2024 they lost $1.56 billion. Now they are down $6.4 billion.
The gap is widening.
Meanwhile, Anthropic, that polite little competitor who actually buys some of their stuff? They’re looking at $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue. First operating profit. A 130% jump. Cute. But let’s get back to the rocket men.
Musk merged xAI and X (yes, that X) into SpaceX in February. The goal? Go public this year with a potential valuation of $1.75 trillion. It might be one of the largest public debuts ever. OpenAI and Anthropic want public debuts too, maybe in 2026. But SpaceX wants to dominate now.
Where does the money come from?
Revenue up, obviously. From $2.62 billion to $3.2 billion. The bump came largely from “AI solutions.” That sounds corporate. It isn’t really.
Breakdown:
– $465 million in AI solutions and infrastructure
– $365 million from X and Grok subscriptions
– $88 million from data licensing
– $116 million in advertising
Advertising still pulls some weight. Subscriptions pull more.
But spend? That is where the story gets loud. Capex for AI segments jumped to $12.7 billion for the whole year. Just the first quarter of 2027 saw $7.7 billion in capital expenditures.
Annualize that rate? About $30.8 billion.
Double year-over-year spend. On chips. On power. On hope.
“The future of AI will be determined by by control of the physical stack”
Is that true? Probably.
The filing says their Colossus and Coloss2 data centers provide roughly 1 gigawatt. They came online fast. 122 days. Then 91. Musk likes speed. He says vertical integration lets them train at “lower cost and higher velocity.” He always says that.
The numbers don’t add up… yet
Users aren’t keeping pace.
SpaceX recorded 117 million monthly active users for Grok AI as of March 26. Total MAUs across the platform? 550 million.
Do the math. Only about one-fifth use the AI features. That feels low for the kind of infrastructure Musk is buying. But he doesn’t care about current metrics as much as next ones.
He wants multiple trillions of parameters. The filing calls it a “step change” in intelligence. A dramatic boost.
What does it mean for spending?
It means the spending isn’t over. It is barely beginning. The “use of proceeds” explicitly lists expanding AI compute.
Here is the twist, if you can call it that.
SpaceX claims they might train and run models on satellites. Orbital data centers. Cheaper than Earth-bound ones, Musk insists. The timeline? As early as 2028.
Three years from now. That feels like sci-fi to most of us. It is written in an SEC filing though.
So there is that.
