Okay. It is time to look (well past the hype, and nonsense) — and decide, whether Elon Musk can make anything sensible, financially — for the investing public, not just himself(!) — out of what is slated to become the largest IPO in history.
The SEC Rule 424(b) red herring is here. Mr. Musk will hold 85% voting control over the company and be its CEO, chairman and chief technology officer, post the IPO. In this preliminary SEC prospectus, we see — minus the shineola — that…
SpaceX lost over $4.9 billion in 2025 and $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, during which the company acquired xAI, the owner of the digital artificial intelligence assistant Grok. [Yikes.]
Starlink is the most profitable segment in the SpaceX fold, with net income from operations of $4.4 billion in 2025 [and adjusted EBITDA of nearly $7.2 billion, including an add-back of ~$2.4 billion in depreciation and amortization].
In the first quarter of 2026, Starlink generated an operating profit of nearly $1.2 billion and similarly adjusted EBITDA of over $2 billion.
Nice. But the satellites must be completely replaced every three to five years — so the cap ex burden is… staggering. And much of the networks is now approaching the end of its useful life. He needs lots more launches, and deployments — without explosive failures — just to keep the treadmill rolling, here.
And, ominously, he’s dropping the per customer revenue from $86 per month, to about $66 per month outside the USA. [The rest of world won’t pay what these stupid Americans will, it seems.] No, in the US, his market will remain wealthy people who live in remote / mountainous areas of the west, mostly… where traditional wi-fi / cell towers are… scarce.
Sorry — that is a market far too narrow (and increasingly shrinking — as cell towers and cable lines reach deeper and deeper into the mountain west, year after year), to support the vast and continual cap ex burden, me thinks.
In 2025, the worst performing segment — his AI boondoggle — posted an operating loss of nearly $6.4 billion. In the first quarter of 2026, those numbers improved to a $936 million operating loss, but the AI segment too is a very heavy capital spender, with significant research and development expenses. AI spent $12.7 billion of capital ex, in 2025 and over $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026. This is not sustainable — with the aggregate cap ex figures for Starlink, and space-launch operations.
So… while this might make him personally the world’s first trillion-aire — I think he is (once again) — as he did in Twitter / X-itter — taking on massive obligations, and telling us to just “trust him”.
[X-itter (according to some pretty good intel) is still hemorrhaging money, now four years later, BTW. But it is private, so there are no complaining public shareholders — or really much, in the way of vetted, audited financial metrics about his X-itter forray.]
All while he looks to / works his Trump-World connections for SpaceX, to try to win lots of NASA / federal government funding — which he hopes will have an endless on ramp for the forever money-losing, cash flow burning SpaceX launch segment / now a lumbering colossus.
Me?
I’ll… pass.
Hard pass, in fact.
This is — when all the smoke and mirrors are moved to the side — simply Musk, laying a vast amount of his personal fortune’s risk profile… off — on a gullible public investor populace.
Enrich him, by funding his money-losers, if you like. But you do so at your considerable peril.
You cannot afford a perhaps $100 billion negative liquidity event. Most of all, not year after year. But that is what he is facing.
If you all don’t come to his rescue, that is.
H I L A R I O U S.
Out.
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