Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX reportedly posted a loss of around $5 billion in 2025 on revenue of more than $18 billion. The loss, reported by The Information, includes metrics from Musk's AI startup xAI, which SpaceX acquired recently. These figures mark a stark contrast from a year earlier's data when SpaceX recorded profits of $8 billion on revenues between $15 billion and $16 billion.
Now, this development comes in the backdrop of SpaceX confidentially filing for its initial public offering (IPO) on the US stock market at a massive valuation of $1.75 trillion. The filing will offer regulators time to review and discuss the company's financial disclosures before the public can access them. The SpaceX IPO could close in June as rivals like OpenAI plan to go public later this year. OpenAI said this week it closed a $122 billion funding round.
Will SpaceX's $5B Loss Hurt Its $2 Trillion Valuation
Losses were attributed to the integration of xAI. Documents released in January revealed that xAI burned through $7.8 billion in the first nine months of 2025, spending $28 million per day on average, as quarterly losses continued to widen. xAI reported a Q3 net loss of $1.46 billion, widening from a loss of $1 billion in Q1.
Amid concerns of xAI's high cash burn impacting SpaceX valuation, reports indicate that SpaceX's valuation surged after xAI acquisition due to a shift in valuation logic: the market no longer sees SpaceX only as a commercial aerospace firm but as a space data centre infrastructure giant. Despite xAI's higher spending and widening losses, its merger structure also isolates its liabilities from SpaceX, preventing any financial impact on the rocket company.
Currently, concerns around xAI losses could be outweighed by the market's excessive frenzy over SpaceX going public and high price-to-earnings ratio predictions for the rocket company.
A successful SpaceX IPO could significantly boost Musk's wealth amid concerns about Tesla's lower-than-expected deliveries, investigations into Grok, and a year of volatility during his engagement at DOGE.
SpaceX Shifting Focus to Orbital Data Centres
SpaceX is currently the world's most active launch company, which was founded to make interplanetary travel possible. Alongside supporting NASA's upcoming moon landing missions, it has recently been focusing on expanding its Starlink coverage and orbital data centers that would operate by harnessing the power of the sun. Note that Starlink, which is among the top operators of satellites, generates over 50% of SpaceX's revenue.
SpaceX acquired xAI in February as part of plans to expedite the development and deployment of solar-powered data centers in space to meet exponentially rising compute and energy demands driven by AI. Although xAI, which owns the social media platform X and develops the Grok chatbot, has lagged behind the capabilities of Claude or ChatGPT, it was still valued at $250 billion during the acquisition.
Details of SpaceX's finances are a tightly held secret and are likely to be revealed as the IPO nears, while other information like the cost of shares will become public after the US SEC reviews the filing. SpaceX is working with multiple banks, including Barclays, to coordinate on orders for the public listing.
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