According to Reuters, SpaceX generated a staggering $8 billion in profit on revenue between $15 billion and $16 billion last year. The company’s Starlink satellite internet service is the main engine, accounting for 50% to 80% of that total revenue from its over 9 million users. With this performance, some banks now estimate SpaceX could be worth over $1.5 trillion in a public offering potentially timed around Elon Musk’s 55th birthday on June 28. Reuters also reports the company is in talks about merging with Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, ahead of that IPO. Furthermore, SpaceX spent $19 billion last year on wireless spectrum rights from EchoStar to push Starlink into the direct-to-device phone market.
Starlink is the cash cow
Here’s the thing: for years, SpaceX was seen as a capital-intensive rocket company burning cash to develop futuristic tech. These numbers flip that script entirely. Starlink isn’t just a side project; it’s a wildly profitable, scaled telecommunications business. An $8 billion EBITDA on ~$15.5 billion in revenue implies a margin north of 50%. That’s the kind of profitability that makes traditional telecom and satellite operators weep. It basically prints the money needed to fund Starship development, which is the whole long-term plan. But it also raises a question: how much more growth is left? They’ve got 9 million subscribers, but the $19 billion spectrum buy shows they’re betting the farm on connecting phones directly, a massively competitive and technically fraught market.
The lofty valuation and IPO dreams
A $1.5 trillion valuation is a mind-boggling number. For context, that would put it in the realm of Amazon and Alphabet, and make it more valuable than every other aerospace and defense company combined. The reported profit makes that number slightly less insane, but it’s still a bet on a future where SpaceX dominates global broadband, space launch, and maybe even space-based data centers. The proposed merger with xAI ahead of the IPO is the real wild card, though. It feels like a move to bake an AI premium into the stock from day one, tying the speculative future of orbital AI compute directly to SpaceX’s balance sheet. It’s risky. It complicates the story for investors who might just want a piece of a profitable satellite internet provider.
Starship and the spectrum gamble
Everything hinges on Starship. Musk expects it to start launching payloads this year, and it needs to, because the next-generation Starlink satellites are bigger and more powerful. Starship is the truck that hauls them to orbit efficiently. Without it, Starlink’s growth and tech roadmap hits a ceiling. And that $19 billion spectrum purchase? That’s a huge, leveraged bet on becoming a direct-to-cell player. They’re going to war with every terrestrial wireless carrier on the planet. The capital expenditure here is enormous, which makes you wonder about that sleek profit margin going forward. Can they maintain it while building Starship and deploying a whole new network architecture? It’s a huge execution challenge, even for SpaceX.
What it all means
Basically, this financial peek shows SpaceX has successfully crossed the chasm from a venture-backed moonshot to a mature, profit-generating industrial technology titan. The revenue streams from government and commercial launches are now solidly underpinned by a consumer-facing product. This level of financial performance in a heavy manufacturing and aerospace sector is nearly unprecedented. For industries relying on robust, connected hardware—from agriculture to shipping to remote infrastructure—the rise of a reliable, global broadband provider like Starlink is a game-changer. It enables a new wave of industrial IoT and real-time data management that simply wasn’t possible before. Companies that need to deploy hardened computing in these environments, like the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, suddenly have a global network to connect their equipment to. The IPO, if it happens, will be a spectacle. But the real story is that SpaceX has built a money machine, and it’s just getting started.
