Musk makes more ambitious claims: SpaceX's revenue will surpass 1 trillion by 2030! Wall Street begins recalculating this figure.

Elon Musk said on Sunday that his rocket company SpaceX(SPCX.US) could reach revenue of $1 trillion by 2030. Just two days before this statement, the company had completed its IPO with a market value exceeding $2 trillion. In response to journalist and financial commentator Jon Erlichman on his social media platform, X, Musk wrote, "I would be surprised if revenue in 2031 is not over $1 trillion." Last Friday, SpaceX became the sixth largest company in the U.S., solidifying Musk's position as the world's first trillionaire. However, compared to tech giants such as Broadcom Inc. (AVGO.US) and Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) with similar valuations, the company's profitability still has a long way to go. In 2025, SpaceX's revenue jumped from $14.02 billion the previous year to $18.67 billion, but the company's performance went from profit of $791 million to a net loss of $4.94 billion. Wall Street is no longer blindly "eating cake" Some Wall Street analysts are cautious about the company's growth prospects. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. previously forecasted that SpaceX's revenue in 2030 would exceed $470 billion, while Morgan Stanley estimated revenue to reach nearly $330 billion. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., as the lead underwriter for SpaceX's IPO, presented a very aggressive forecast to potential investors during the roadshow. The firm predicted that SpaceX's AI business (including xAI) revenue would skyrocket from $3.2 billion in 2025 to $322 billion in 2030, with total revenue increasing from $18.7 billion to $474 billion, with Starlink contributing approximately $144 billion. This implies that revenue needs to grow 25 times in the next five years, with a compound annual growth rate of over 90%. Morgan Stanley previously predicted that SpaceX's revenue by 2030 would be close to $330 billion, much lower than Musk's target, but nearly 18 times the current scale. However, Morningstar's valuation is more conservative, giving an enterprise valuation of $780 billion, less than half of SpaceX's IPO market value. The firm pointed out that the long-term prospects of the AI business still face the dual challenges of intense competition and profit uncertainty. From "cash cow" to "revenue engine" In the grand narrative of trillion-dollar revenue, Starlink satellite internet service is seen as the most reliable financial pillar for SpaceX. In 2025, Starlink contributed $11.4 billion in revenue, accounting for 61% of SpaceX's total revenue. By the first quarter of 2026, this ratio had climbed to nearly two-thirds, with quarterly revenue reaching $3.3 billion, and an adjusted EBITDA profit margin maintained at 60%-70%. As of April 2026, Starlink's global subscriptions surpassed 17 million, more than double the 5 million at the end of 2024. Mainstream airlines such as United Airlines, Southwest Airlines Co., and Hawaiian Airlines have adopted its in-flight WiFi service, and the brand valuation has entered the Brand Finance Global 500 for the first time. Starlink's business model has unique appeal: once the satellite constellation is deployed, marginal service costs are extremely low, and subscription revenue is highly predictable. Musk estimated that if Starlink could capture 3%-5% of the global telecom market, annual revenue could reach $30 billion ten times the historical peak of SpaceX's rocket launch business. SpaceX plans to deploy the next generation V3 satellites using the Starship rocket in 2027, with the capacity to launch 50 at a time, increasing constellation expansion efficiency by over 7 times. However, concerns still exist. There is a huge disparity in Starlink's global pricing: $120 per month in the U.S., $41 in France, and only $24 in Zambia. As user growth shifts towards low GDP countries, the ARPU (average revenue per user) may continue to be under pressure. Data from 2025 showed that while users grew by 76%, revenue only grew by 53%, confirming this trend. "Money burning machine" In February 2026, SpaceX completed the merger with Musk's AI company, xAI, with a transaction valuation of around $250 billion. This integration is packaged as a grand narrative of "space AI infrastructure" using Starlink's global satellite network for distributed AI computing, with xAI's Grok model forming a closed loop with the X platform data. However, the financial reality is not optimistic. Of SpaceX's $49.4 billion net loss in 2025, investments in AI infrastructure were the main drag. Total capital expenditures for the year were $20.7 billion, with nearly $12.7 billion flowing into the AI field (GPU clusters, data centers, engineering talent), far exceeding Starlink's $4.2 billion and the rocket business's $3.8 billion. In the first quarter of 2026, AI-related capital expenditures skyrocketed to $7.7 billion, accounting for 76% of total expenses. Critics have described xAI as a "clinically significant money-burning machine." SpaceX's holdings of 18,700 bitcoins (fair value $1.29 billion) were prominently marked in the prospectus, implying that the company is hedging against uncertainty in the AI business through diversification investments. "Dimensionality reduction" for equal market value giants With a support of $2 trillion market value, SpaceX's financial data appears "meager" compared to traditional tech giants of equivalent size. A comparison of its financials with Amazon.com, Inc. and Broadcom Inc. reveals a huge disparity in valuation. With a market value of around $2 trillion, Amazon.com, Inc. generated over $600 billion in revenue in 2025, which is 32 times that of SpaceX ($18.67 billion). This means that Amazon.com, Inc. can achieve SpaceX's total annual revenue in just over ten days. Amazon.com, Inc. and Broadcom Inc. contribute hundreds of billions of dollars in net profits to shareholders each year. In contrast, SpaceX, while increasing revenue from $14.02 billion in 2025 to $18.67 billion, saw its net performance plummet from profit of $791 million to a net loss of $4.94 billion. SpaceX's massive losses are not due to its core business not being profitable, but rather due to its staggering capital expenditures. In 2025, total capital expenditures were $20.7 billion, of which nearly 76% went to AI infrastructure construction. In the first quarter of 2026, its cash and cash equivalents plummeted from $24.7 billion to $15.9 billion in just three months, forcing the company to apply for a $20 billion bridge loan in March this year. What is Musk "selling"? The sky-high valuation of SpaceX is not supported by current financial data, but by a "option narrative" about the future of humanity. Musk's "trillion revenue in 2031" is a highly provocative goal that will force the company to continuously demonstrate the speed of its commercialization in the coming years. However, rational observers should be wary of the deviation between valuation and fundamentals. Over the next 24 months, the market will no longer be satisfied with just hearing stories but will scrutinize every data point with a critical eye: Will Starship achieve true full-flow reuse? When will Starlink achieve sustained profitability? And, when will that massive AI infrastructure order of hundreds of billions of dollars land? The only thing that can be certain is that the road to $1 trillion will not be as easy as Musk's tweets make it seem.