SpaceX continues to ride IPO fervor, but there’s more to the company than rocket ships

Elon Musk’s SpaceX continues to ride a wave of investor enthusiasm following its record-setting public offering last week, with the newly minted shares climbing to a peak of nearly 60% over IPO pricing before edging down.

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Around midday Wednesday, SpaceX stock, listed under the SPCX label on the Nasdaq Exchange, was trading at just over $198 per share, giving the company a market capitalization of just over $2.6 trillion.

But SpaceX, the space vehicle and launch systems company started by Musk in 2002, has grown into a technology conglomerate that now also includes the Starlink satellite internet service and network, artificial intelligence startup xAI that includes the Grok chatbot and various data center facilities, as well as the X social media platform that xAI acquired in 2025.

The SEC filings reveal that while the company brought in $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up sharply from 2024, it still lost almost $5 billion last year.

The real value proposition of the company, according to industry experts, will likely come from outside the realm of cosmic travel and transport.

Here’s what we know about the various business entities under the SpaceX umbrella and how investment prognosticators see their various potentials.

SpaceX

Founded in 2002 as a standalone company with an aspirational mission statement about colonizing Mars, SpaceX has evolved into the world’s most active commercial space company, amassing a slew of benchmark innovations. Those include designing the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station in 2012 and in 2020 and earning the same distinction in 2020 for ferrying astronauts to the ISS. It has also developed the first reusable space vehicle components and become an essential player in NASA’s plans to put humans back on the moon and eventually a manned mission to Mars. The space vehicle division is heavily dependent on NASA contract revenues but also carries satellites for other entities and performs regular deliveries of Starlink internet and communication satellites to low-Earth orbit.

According to SpaceX filings with federal regulators ahead of its IPO, the rocket launch unit lost $657 million last year. Industry watchers say the successful development of its latest rocket, dubbed Starship, will be critical to the division’s long-term success. Starship is slated to play a critical role in NASA’s Artemis program aiming to return humans to the moon, now anticipated for sometime in 2028.

“Our primary concern is that SpaceX’s long-term strategy remains heavily dependent on Starship,” CFRA analyst Keith Snyder wrote in a note to clients, per a CNBC report, saying that the Starship rocket could be a “bottleneck” for various SpaceX initiatives.

xAI

Musk founded artificial intelligence development company xAI in 2023, entering a race to advance the new digital tools in a realm that was already teeming with well-financed competitors including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

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The company released its Grok chatbot in late 2023, which is currently in its version 4.3 release. xAI also built a massive supercomputer, Colossus, and launched a data center business, in part to support the computing needs of its various development efforts. In its first big, post-IPO action, SpaceX on Tuesday announced a $60 billion deal to acquire AI coding startup Cursor, a move that could boost xAI’s ability to compete with popular coding products offered by Anthropic and OpenAI.

SpaceX has stated it believes there’s a $28.5 trillion total addressable market across space, connectivity and artificial intelligence tools, with AI representing the biggest slice of that potential. SpaceX says its struck deals for data center usage that could bring as much as $26 billion in new annual revenues and has hinted at plans to build a data center network in space.

In a social media posting over the weekend, Musk said he believes it’s possible for SpaceX to reach $1 trillion in annual revenues by 2030.

SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal in February 2026.

Starlink

SpaceX began launching Starlink satellites in 2019 and has since grown the “constellation” of its communication links to over 10,000 satellites with plans in place to grow the network significantly. The satellites provide internet connectivity to rural customers and can also function as a communication network for government and military clients.

Starlink showed up as a bright spot in SpaceX SEC filings as the only division that showed a profit last year, generating $4.42 billion in income. That’s thanks to the service’s current user base of over 10 million.

SpaceX has submitted an application to put as many as 1 million satellites into low-Earth orbit. Beside being popular with Earth-bound customers, Starlink also provides in-flight internet services to dozens of airlines.

Like its AI division, Starlink faces a landscape of competitors and, in its prospectus, listed some 20 companies operating in the satellite communications realm including Amazon, Blue Origin, Viasat, AT&T and T-Mobile, per a CNBC report.

X

Since Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and rebranded it with the X moniker, the company has been in pretty steady decline, including last year when its ad sales revenue dropped by 65%, according to a New York Times report.

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The social media platform was folded into xAI in May 2025.