Thinking of buying SpaceX?

Exactly one week from today, Elon’s biggest company (already bigger than Tesla!) will go public under the ticker SPCX.

It will be the largest IPO in history. Also the most hyped, displacing Meta Platform’s (META) 2012 IPO, which didn’t go well out of the gate.

Whenever this much hype builds around an asset, it's worth taking a step back and thinking carefully.

SpaceX is an incredible company. I love what it’s doing. It’s going to be a massive success, and I strongly believe it will be the biggest company in the world one day.

SpaceX is also highly misunderstood. It’s not just a rocket company. For example, I doubt one in 10 people even know it owns artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI, which owns X (formerly Twitter).

SpaceX also built and owns one of the world’s biggest data centers, which it’s leasing to Claude’s parent company Anthropic for $1 billion per month.

To help you understand SpaceX and all the disruptions its IPO will unleash, I’m dedicating the next few Jolts exclusively to SpaceX.

SpaceX’s IPO is the Super Bowl of disruption. Play it right, and there’s lots of money to be made.

Let’s dig into its various business lines to see what exactly you’re buying when you buy stock in SpaceX.

• The foundation of SpaceX’s business is space.

Specifically, the launch business. Falcon 9... Falcon Heavy... The Dragon capsule... Starship... NASA missions... Defense launches... Commercial payloads. And someday, lunar and Mars logistics.

In 2025, the Space segment brought in about $4.1 billion in sales.

SpaceX essentially owns the gateway to orbit. It launched more than 80% of total global mass-to-orbit flights in 2025.

Everybody else operating in space (companies building satellites, sensors, defense systems, lunar landers) needs an affordable, reliable ride. And most of the time, that means paying SpaceX for a spot on one of its rockets.

But the Space business is no cash cow.

Building the biggest, most powerful rockets in history requires an enormous amount of money. A single Falcon 9 launch can burn through an estimated $15 million to $28 million.

And SpaceX has already poured more than $15 billion into developing its massive Starship rocket, which isn’t operational yet.

So while this segment’s strategic value is huge, profitability is still far away.

• Connectivity—aka Starlink—is the cash cow.

Starlink is the largest satellite constellation ever built.

More than 10,000 satellites beam high-speed internet to over 10 million subscribers in more than 100 countries.

Starlink’s subscriber base has almost doubled in the past 15 months. It took the old telecom giants decades to reach comparable scale.

In 2025, Starlink’s sales jumped about 50% to $11.4 billion. It now brings in two-thirds of SpaceX’s revenues.

But unlike the Space businesses, Starlink is highly profitable. And it’s only going to get better. Each new subscriber makes Starlink stronger, bringing in more reliable monthly revenue that SpaceX can use to launch more satellites.

Starlink revenue could potentially double this year as the subscriber base continues to grow rapidly.

Think of Starlink like Amazon’s (AMZN) AWS cloud computing business. A recurring revenue machine quietly humming away inside what most folks see as a rocket company.

• But the biggest opportunity is AI.

In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot. As I mentioned, it also owns the X platform.

So when you buy SpaceX stock, you’re also buying one of the world’s largest AI companies.

The company’s AI stack includes:

• xAI’s Grok models.

  
  

• The X platform, a real-time data and distribution source.

  
  

• Two of the world’s largest AI clusters, called Colossus and Colossus II.

  
  

• And a long-term plan to put AI data centers into orbit.

In 2025, this segment brought in some $3.2 billion in revenue. That’s going to grow. SpaceX recently inked a deal to rent out some of its computing power to AI powerhouse Anthropic for a reported $1.25 billion per month.

And that’s just one client!

SpaceX estimates the total addressable market (TAM)—the total value of the market xAI could potentially sell into—at $28.5 trillion. They’re calling it “the largest actionable TAM in human history.”

That is unquestionably true.

• Is all that worth $1.75 trillion today?

That’s the valuation at which SpaceX is IPOing. It’ll instantly rank among the 10 largest companies in the world. It’ll be worth more than Meta and Walmart (WMT).

That’s the thing about IPOs: A great company can have a bad IPO. In fact, that happens more often than not.

So I’m very enthusiastic about SpaceX as a company. But its valuation and IPO? We’ll cover that on Monday.

I plan to give you a lot to think about and a lot of value in these free Jolt issues next week, as I always strive to do.

But if you’re a Disruption Investor member, you’ll find our best premium, actionable insights in your new issue, just released yesterday. It’s called The SpaceX IPO Playbook. Click here to access it. 

If you’re not yet a Disruption Investor member, now’s a good time to become one. After all, this is the Super Bowl of disruption! Go here to activate your membership.

Stephen McBride Chief Analyst, RiskHedge