SpaceX Lists in 48 Hours: xAI Lost $6.4B in 2025 While Starlink's 63% Margins Absorbed the Bill
SpaceX lists on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12, raising at least $75 billion at a valuation the filing implies could reach $2 trillion. Before buying the pitch, investors should read the segment financials in the S-1 — because SpaceX was profitable before Elon Musk merged xAI into it.
In 2024, before the all-stock xAI acquisition closed in February 2026, SpaceX posted net income of $791 million. The company recast its 2025 results to incorporate xAI and reported a $4.94 billion net loss for the full year. The gap between those two numbers is the size of the bet.
The Three Segments
The S-1 breaks SpaceX into three reporting segments: Space (launch, Starship), Connectivity (Starlink), and AI (xAI, Grok, X, Colossus infrastructure).
Connectivity is the machine. Starlink generated $11.387 billion in 2025 revenue, posting $7.168 billion in segment EBITDA at a 63% margin. That margin exceeds every major telecom and satellite peer on the public markets. Free cash flow was $2.99 billion — the primary source of cash for the rest of the company.
Space generated $4.086 billion in revenue but absorbed $3 billion in Starship R&D expense, turning what would otherwise have been a profitable launch business into a $657 million operating loss. SpaceX has expensed more than $15 billion in cumulative Starship development through R&D rather than capitalizing it. Once Starship enters commercial payload delivery — the filing targets early 2027 — those costs reclassify from R&D to capital expenditure, adding roughly $3 billion in reported operating income in the transition year from accounting mechanics alone.
AI generated $3.201 billion in revenue, inclusive of advertising from X. The segment posted a $6.355 billion operating loss and a $13.964 billion free cash flow loss in 2025, driven by $20.7 billion in AI capital expenditure deployed to build Colossus and Colossus II. The AI division ran an operating loss of $1.561 billion in 2024; in 2025, that figure quadrupled.
Anthropic Is the Anchor Tenant
The most consequential single line item in the AI segment is the Anthropic compute contract: $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, or $15 billion annually, for access to xAI’s GPU infrastructure. That contract is what makes the Colossus buildout remotely serviceable as a business while Grok’s revenue scales.
It is also a concentration risk. Either party can exit with 90 days’ notice. If Anthropic finds alternative compute — through its own Google Cloud deal, through the Broadcom AI XPV Platform, or through any other arrangement — SpaceX loses its largest AI customer with a single quarterly warning.
Q1 2026: Acceleration, Not Stabilization
The updated S-1 added Q1 2026 financials. The numbers show the AI buildout getting heavier, not lighter:
| Metric | Q1 2026 |
|---|---|
| Total revenue | $4.69B |
| Net loss | $4.28B |
| Total capex | $10.1B |
| AI segment capex | $7.7B (76% of total) |
| Starlink capex | $1.3B |
| Operating cash flow | $1.0B (positive) |
| Investing outflow | $16.7B |
At the Q1 2026 AI capex pace, SpaceX is on track to spend more than $30 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, against $12.7 billion in 2025. The company raised $7.1 billion in Q1 financing to bridge the gap.
The Balance Sheet Problem
Total principal debt stands at $29.1 billion as of March 31, 2026. The core liability is a $20 billion bridge loan raised in March 2026 to retire X and xAI legacy junk debt — at up to 12.5% rates — with a cheaper 4.58% instrument. That bridge matures in September 2027: fifteen months after the expected IPO date. Refinancing it at scale requires market conditions and a credit profile that don’t yet exist; the $75 billion IPO raise is partly the mechanism to address the maturity wall.
Net debt was $13.2 billion at Q1 close. Annualized interest expense at Q1 rates is approximately $2.7 billion, representing roughly 40% of 2025 operating cash flow.
The Valuation Question
At $135 per share, SpaceX is being valued at approximately $1.75 trillion — roughly 94 times 2025 revenue and more than 2,200 times the last year it was profitable. The S-1 devotes 47% of segment-specific language to AI while AI generated 17% of 2025 revenue (6.7% excluding X advertising).
The pitch requires investors to believe three things simultaneously: that Grok becomes a competitive AI product in a market dominated by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic; that orbital compute becomes commercially viable in the 2030s; and that Starlink continues to generate $7+ billion in annual EBITDA to underwrite the build while those bets play out.
Goldman Sachs has called AI SpaceX’s largest future value driver and projected 100x revenue growth by 2030. That analysis is priced in. What is not priced in is what happens if the Anthropic contract terminates, if Grok fails to scale past X’s user base, or if the bridge loan requires refinancing into a tighter credit market.
SpaceX’s profitable core — launch services and Starlink — is a real business worth a real premium. The question the S-1 does not answer is how much of the $1.75 trillion is paying for that business, and how much is paying for a science fiction chapter about orbital data centers that has a $20 billion debt maturity arriving in fifteen months.