The main takeaways from Elon Musk’s plans for $1.75tn SpaceX flotation

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has revealed plans for a highly anticipated $1.75tn (£1.3tn) flotation next month as he seeks investor backing for his quest to make life “multiplanetary”. SpaceX is a sprawling business, encompassing the eponymous rocket launch company, the Starlink satellite broadband service, Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence startup and the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Details about these businesses and Musk’s ambitions for them were laid out in a flotation prospectus. Here are some of the main takeaways from it. SpaceX is loss-making The entire business lost $4.9bn in 2025 on revenues of $18.7bn. Revenue is growing, however, rising by a third on 2024. SpaceX’s losses have widened since the start of the year, losing $4.3bn in the first quarter, compared with a loss of $528m in the same period last year. The company is split into three segments: space, which incorporates the rocket launch business whose clients include Nasa; connectivity, which houses Starlink; and AI, the unit behind xAI and the X platform. Connectivity makes the most revenue, at $11.4bn, followed by space with $4.1bn and AI at $3.2bn. The Starlink unit was the only profitable segment in the first three months of this year. The AI unit is heavily loss making, losing $6.4bn last year, which reflected factors such as higher computing expenses (for instance to build and operate the AI models that power Musk’s Grok tool). Capital expenditure was $20.7bn, with the xAI unit again showing itself to be a big cost centre. It accounted for $12.7bn of the total, primarily due to the cost of building massive datacentres. SpaceX has built the appropriately named Colossus datacentre. Mars ambitions There are some extraterrestrial aspirations in the document that are not found in the average flotation prospectus. The section marked “future markets” includes the following: space tourism; energy production and manufacturing on the moon and Mars; and asteroid mining. The prospe…