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impulser_ 12 hours ago [-]
"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee"
Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.
wickedly underrated film. my all time favorite in the skynet genre.
the vocoder speech at the end is just exquisite.
Arodex 10 minutes ago [-]
Can't wait for the next model to be called "torment nexus" /s
chvid 9 hours ago [-]
As far as I can Google the colossus data centers did cost about 7-10 and 18 B respectively.
Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.
BoredPositron 8 hours ago [-]
It's really not.
gekoxyz 8 hours ago [-]
can you elaborate?
lumost 8 hours ago [-]
Napkin math on 5 year depreciation is 5.5 billion per year for 28 billion. However the 28 billion is cash upfront, spacex is probably paying 10-20% interest on the 28 billion for another 2-6 billion per year.
So net you are looking at finance expenses of 7-11 billion per year. The electricity costs will be significant on top of that, but harder to get a solid read on.
Net of everything, spacex may be getting a 14-28 percent yield before paying for electricity. After electricity/insurance/data/taxes/other expenses - I’d guess it’s anywhere between 0% and 7% yield.
Odds are good that Anthropic abandons the deal before the depreciation schedule completes. Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
burnerRhodov3 6 hours ago [-]
5.5 year depreciation is only on the chips. Power, networking, cabling, the actual construction of the building is probably closer to 60% of that number. Also, they are only renting out colosus 1 ($10B), not colosus II ($18B).
So, it's 10B, with $4b of that being attributed to a 5 year depreciation. The rest of the facility probably has a depreciation of around 20 years, and you can easily swap out GPU's, TPU's, Trititum, Tesla's own GPU's, as they start failing, so the normal depreciation curve only "kinda applies here".
There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.
Electricity is coming from Nat Gas Turbines, so again even though you have a some depreciation on the equipment there, you are getting it for far below meter prices.
So, from my math, he gets ROI on the chips in 3 months, and ROI on the entire facility in 9 months? That's literally the best investment of all time.
kgwgk 5 hours ago [-]
> There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.
Who is "he"? SpaceX has $20bn of debt and $9bn in "other financing" corresponding to "obligations related to certain AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions."
burnerRhodov3 5 hours ago [-]
Edit: Page 122 of the S-1. They are paying SOFR + 0.75%. So around 5.5% on the $20B.
I'll keep the below for integrity sake:
Well, i'm sure SpaceX bought Xai using some kind of prefered share/debt financing, but that's not to say that XAI had the original debt financing.
We can never know what the exact details, and the exact financing is on this debt. Maybe it's tied to Elon's Tesla Shares, Maybe it's tied to a convertible, maybe it is actual "loans" from a bank. Even at $9b in debt, and you naivly assume they are paying 10% (Def not 20% as OP claimed), you are paying $900m a year, for the entirety of xAi. Including that in the calculations to rent out the entire compute is folly. Not only is 900M not directly attributed to c1, cause it's split between c1, c2 and all the training runs, but you can never verify the interest. And even then, one month of this deal pays for the whole year of interest expense.
So go ahead and lower my estimate by 10%... doesn't make a difference.
kgwgk 4 hours ago [-]
> We can never know what the exact details
If only there was some SEC filing available disclosing additional information about the 6-months $20bn bridge loan which was on the news four weeks ago…
burnerRhodov3 4 hours ago [-]
oh, nice! thanks for this. This confirms spaceX has $20B at a SOFR + 0.75%. So around 5%-5.5%. Found on page 122 of the S-1. I assume they will retire all debt with the $50B raised from the IPO, plus have $30B to... dominate with starship. If starship is around $100m per launch right now, they can launch 300 ships with the IPO. or 30,000T in orbit.
hvb2 2 hours ago [-]
> If starship is around $100m per launch right now, they can launch 300 ships with the IPO. or 30,000T in orbit.
Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.
Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.
burnerRhodov3 59 minutes ago [-]
we will see tomorrow, won't we :)
But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.
Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.
I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.
tonfa 5 hours ago [-]
> Also, they are only renting out colosus 1 ($10B), not colosus II ($18B).
The news from the S1 is that they're renting both (see OP).
burnerRhodov3 5 hours ago [-]
yes, it says they will be paying for "additional capacity" at a reduced rate as it becomes availble in May and June.
Essentially, they are using most of C2 for Grok5. That training run is coming to an End, and they will be leasing more capacity. So taht 1.25b per month will go up to around $1.5B-$2B per month as they finish grok 5.
So the 1.25B is for c1, and the revenue will scale into c2. No idea how much scale, but c2 is almost double the compute? So potentially $3b a month, but probably closer to $2.5B since they get a discount.
nl 5 hours ago [-]
That depreciation it too high in practice.
5 year old H100s are now completed depreciated but are being rented out at higher rates than when they were new.
> Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
I'd LOVE a way to be on the other side of that bet.
If only there was another way outside of buying into all the other Elon risks associated with SpaceX.
bluecalm 7 hours ago [-]
That assumes they are renting out the whole capacity. Have you seen anything suggesting that's the case?
tredre3 7 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is renting the whole capacity (of one of the colossus), it was a big part of the announcement.
Yeah one of them but the costs in the calculation are for two of them.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
We all know very little of that is gonna materialize long term.
Reality is that this is all to show some more (theorical) revenue and will be scrapped 6 months from now.
ykl 12 hours ago [-]
At the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new?
At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?
impulser_ 12 hours ago [-]
They are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer".
Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
ACCount37 10 hours ago [-]
Colossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that's fully operational.
dbalatero 10 hours ago [-]
Then why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state?
Yes and both are getting sued? I wouldn't necessarily classify the NAACP as environmental activists, but they are concerned with the wellbeing of the people they represent.
rafram 7 hours ago [-]
> "Environmental activists" are scum of the earth, as a rule
> Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
I suspect your definition of a lousy place to build infrastructure in might overlap with my definition of a relatively good place to live.
inglor_cz 2 hours ago [-]
"I suspect your definition of a lousy place to build infrastructure in might overlap with my definition of a relatively good place to live."
Which is quite close to the standard NIMBY attitude: "I want good grid, cheap electricity and other infrastructure, but not in my backyard. Either someone else's, or somewhere where no one lives at all."
Can't you see the fundamental problem with that attitude? We mostly live in densely populated regions. We do need roads, rail and power plants to sustain our way of living, you too.
9 hours ago [-]
gpm 11 hours ago [-]
Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.
mvkel 6 hours ago [-]
If this doesn't completely destroy any benefit of doubt that people have in Dario, I don't know what to say. The guy has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth since the foundation of Anth. Over and over he repeated that Anth's investment in compute would not be reckless; it would represent sanity and be proportional to growth. Over and over Anth told users that the models weren't nerfed overnight, we were just prompting wrong. As expected, Anth simply failed to make the early compute deals when everyone else did, and are now forced to be on the wrong end of price gouging just to keep pace. Actions speak louder than words.
Traster 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is right. Anthropic's growth in the last 6 months went hockey stick in quite an unexpected way (eclipsing OpenAI), so they've done what is sensible - they've increased their compute spend. I don't know if what they're buying from SpaceX is good value, I think there's plenty of reasons to think they got a fine deal. X AI failed. Everyone left. So SpaceX is sitting with a bunch of empty server farms. Yes, Anthropic are desparate for compute, but SpaceX are desparate to IPO a company with double digit billion dollar revenue for $2T so I think there's good reason that this deal represents reasonable value.
nl 5 hours ago [-]
I don't see how this follows at all?
It's true that Anthropic didn't buy as much compute as OpenAI. But OpenAI's compute purchases are one of the largest investments in human history.
It's also true that they are now scrambling for compute, and might be paying more than OpenAI paid. But now they have the revenue to justify it!
To me it is the opposite of "speaking out of both sides of his mouth" - he's been consistent in his "we won't be reckless in buying compute too far ahead of demand" message.
chilmers 1 hours ago [-]
So you're complaining that his actions matched his words?
He didn't make compute deals until he saw the growth necessary to justify them. As a result, they're paying over-the-odds compared to if they'd have make deals earlier. Maybe that was a poor business decision, but I'm not sure how it represents speaking out of "both sides of his mouth"? Sounds like he was honest.
jatora 5 hours ago [-]
skeptical of someone who talks about anthropic enough that they think 'anth' is a reasonable abbreviation lol. maybe youre not wrong but youre definitely biased and not coming to conclusions in a rational way
khazhoux 1 hours ago [-]
How does taking a shortcut on the name indicate bias? Or, are people similarly biased when they talk about msft, nv, fb, OAI, ...?
lz400 5 hours ago [-]
Even if we consider what they pay for colossus high (I've no idea, I haven't looked at the numbers), wouldn't this a bit be different from "investing in infrastructure"? They're not building the DC themselves, they're just renting, they can scale down to 0 anytime and not have pressure to recover costs, they don't have debt on the HW, etc.
JCTheDenthog 5 hours ago [-]
At least from how it's described in the filing, it sounds like they're committed through 2029 on the deal with SpaceX. So they can't just pull out without a massive lawsuit from SpaceX.
neosat 12 hours ago [-]
has anyone done the math on:
1. cost to build out and run the data centers
2. cost of compute (hardware and energy)
3. depreciation of legacy GPU and thus value at the end of 3 years.
And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe it is a win/win. Anthropic gets desperately needed compute at a fair price. SpaceXAI sells compute at a fair price and gets desperately needed revenues.
sroussey 6 hours ago [-]
Tesla loses out on that revenue since it was their chips to begin with, right?
oliv5900 3 hours ago [-]
XAi purchased Teslas allocation of GPUs, in exchange for Tesla purchasing XAis allocation of GPUs at a later date. This they claim was done because Tesla didnt have their datacentre ready to receive those gpus at that time. I dont see how or who was robbed here.
foobiekr 5 hours ago [-]
No. xAI is buying Nvidia, not using Tesla chips.
foxylad 6 hours ago [-]
Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.
He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.
And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.
nl 5 hours ago [-]
> Ed Zitron
His math is wrong though. He still claims H100s are worthless but in fact they are worth more now than when they were new.
And everything I've read from him is just.. weird? Like he has an anti-AI agenda and he interpreters everything through that?
He is complaining that there are no 1GW+ data centers, with evidence like this:
> For example, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported in October 2025 that Amazon’s Indiana-based (allegedly) 2.2GW Project Rainier data center was “operational,” but only seven out of a planned 30 buildings were actually operational, and her comment of “with two more campuses [of indeterminate capacity] underway.” This comment was buried two videos and 600 words into a piece that declared the data center was “now operational,” with the express intent of making you think the whole thing was operational.
But if you read the report that "buried" comment is far from buried - the whole thing is about how it is still under construction!
Of course 1GW data centers don't all come online at once! You get them online in the parts you can as soon as you can!
From a previous comment of mine – the quotes are all from a single article:
He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person.
> I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence.
> I am so very bored of having this conversation
> I don't care about this number!
> Shut the fuck up!
> This isn't the early days of shit.
> Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine.
> $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic.
> This isn’t real business! Sorry!
> He said in one of his stupid and boring blogs that
> This man is full of shit! Hey, tech media people reading this — your readers hate this shit! Stop printing it! Stop it!
> It's here where I'm going to choose to scream.
> Dario Amodei — much like Sam Altman — is a liar, a crook, a carnival barker and a charlatan, and the things he promises
are equal parts ridiculous and offensive.
> Why are we humoring these oafs?
> Despite Newton's fawning praise
> Nobody talks like this! This isn’t how human beings sound! I don’t like reading it!
> Ewww.
> I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.
> I know, I know, I'm a hater, I'm a pessimist, a cynic, but I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product
> I know this has been a rant-filled newsletter, but I'm so tired of being told to be excited about this warmed-up dogshit.
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
> I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously.
When I read this kind of thing, it’s very apparent that this is being driven entirely by spite not insight. He’s just so angry about everything. There are 57 exclamation marks in this article!
Pay too much attention to this kind of thing and it will poison your mind.
chatmasta 10 hours ago [-]
SpaceX is already indicating their strategy on this, because they’re renting their last-gen data center to Anthropic and keeping the current-gen data center for themselves. Rinse and repeat.
BoredPositron 8 hours ago [-]
It's same gen.
treis 11 hours ago [-]
It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.
impulser_ 11 hours ago [-]
Well Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s & GB300s.
So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
denimnerd42 11 hours ago [-]
a GB300 rack is like 5-6 million so seems a bit low.
impulser_ 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, maybe these aren't good guesses. I was basing it off CapEx and Elon's tweet about them. Maybe C2 isn't completely filled yet.
jfkdkdkdk 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kgc 1 hours ago [-]
If my napkin math is right, Anthropic will make SpaceX/Xai whole on the initial investment for Colossus 2 + operating costs + a small profit by the end of the contract. No massive profits, although they may be able to fudge accounting to make it seem that way.
world2vec 24 minutes ago [-]
You're ignoring all the depreciation costs.
cherioo 8 hours ago [-]
It’s also interesting that Cursor (that spacex is acquiring ) also just announced yesterday they are training in colossus.
So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?
etempleton 9 hours ago [-]
The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.
dopa42365 7 hours ago [-]
The most honest memory cartel is reporting stupid profit numbers too!
>Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027
To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.
bottlepalm 5 hours ago [-]
There is a lot of money coming in from industry, actually an exponentially increasing amount of money - money that would otherwise go to employees is now going to AI companies. There are more startups than you can shake a stick at that are basically creating virtual workers for xyz task and selling them to companies. All that money is funneling back to AI companies. It's a gold rush and employee salaries are the gold.
btian 9 hours ago [-]
How is SpaceX not making money?
Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.
Anthropic is also profitable now.
etempleton 8 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is not profitable and does not expect to be revenue even until 2028. They are just losing less billions per year than everyone else.
theptip 8 hours ago [-]
As always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit.
By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.
fooblaster 7 hours ago [-]
how exactly can you assume they have unit profitability
theptip 7 hours ago [-]
Plenty of analysis on this point, the inputs are not secret. Check out Semianalysis for example.
You can quibble about the exact numbers, but I think it’s fairly clear at this point that inference is profitable with decent margins. Like you say, unit economics are more interesting than the profitability of the company as a whole.
fooblaster 6 hours ago [-]
so speculation from a semiconductor website. that's incredibly likely to be wrong
theptip 5 hours ago [-]
I think you should do a bit of research and come back once you have fixed your knowledge gaps.
satvikpendem 5 hours ago [-]
We will see once Anthropic releases their S-1 too this summer.
kurthr 9 hours ago [-]
Except that they're loaning a bunch of money to their "customers" to "buy" their products. It's still really circular.
etempleton 9 hours ago [-]
This thing is going to explode. From this I have to imagine OpenAIs numbers are also going to be much worse than people imagine / what has been shared.
LarsDu88 12 hours ago [-]
Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.
nolta 11 hours ago [-]
Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
baron816 12 hours ago [-]
Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.
nickff 11 hours ago [-]
The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.
kube-system 11 hours ago [-]
They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
keeda 10 hours ago [-]
And when Anthropic runs Claude on Allbirds' GPUs they'll give it a SOLE.md.
aaronbrethorst 11 hours ago [-]
I see what you did there.
foobiekr 5 hours ago [-]
A shocking number of the neocloud teams have exactly one skill set: raising money.
A few of them also have locked in power agreements.
Almost none of them have the expertise to build anything. Some of them are even outsourcing that to geezer tech and consulting shops.
It's not going to go well.
keeda 10 hours ago [-]
Whoa. I've said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view.
While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario's part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better.
This won't hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won't look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.
sdwr 9 hours ago [-]
They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.
stingraycharles 9 hours ago [-]
Being drowned in demand and scrambling for compute because you’re more successful than anticipated is a better problem than the other way around.
keeda 7 hours ago [-]
Oh, for sure it could be much worse -- they could have been in xAI's place! ;-)
But while this is a "good problem to have" it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable.
Now, I'm totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!
Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it would have been better to drink his own Kool Aid!
Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.
riffraff 5 hours ago [-]
> Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!
Worst case there wouldn't be anyone interested in renting it either, they would have tens of billions of useless data centers fastly losing value.
s2cdd 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
keeda 7 hours ago [-]
That's fair, I'm not a finance person, just meant to say that this is costing them way more than they would have liked at a critical stage in their corporate evolution. I'm curious though what your take is.
gjsman-1000 12 hours ago [-]
$45 billion for a 3 year rental.
TheAlchemist 12 hours ago [-]
What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.
jsnell 12 hours ago [-]
The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
pianoben 11 hours ago [-]
Nobody pays MSRP at that scale
eightysixfour 11 hours ago [-]
Given global demand and that they were late to the order party, they probably paid more lol
gpapilion 4 hours ago [-]
Yes and no. They paid what everyone else pays for those gpus. NVIDIA make the profit and leaves crumbs for the rest. For other components they paid less, but since the gpus are the majority of the cost…
btian 12 hours ago [-]
Closer to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.
tristanj 10 hours ago [-]
More like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.
pbmango 12 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
TheAlchemist 12 hours ago [-]
The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
gjsman-1000 12 hours ago [-]
... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.
thetrb 12 hours ago [-]
how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Are GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?
3eb7988a1663 7 hours ago [-]
I thought I saw a report from someone at Google saying that they were still running 7+ year old hardware because of demand. Even if it is not state of the art, if it generates more than the electricity costs, keep it running until it dies.
WarmWash 6 hours ago [-]
Efficiency gains have been so intense that old hardware is still viable for serving brand new mid size models.
moogly 11 hours ago [-]
And how many of them were diverted from Tesla?
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that Tesla didn't use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.
The article says:
In December, an internal Nvidia memo seen by CNBC said, “Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”
10 hours ago [-]
11 hours ago [-]
Eldodi 13 hours ago [-]
Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets.
- Space / launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss
- AI / xAI / X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss
Starlink metrics:
- Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026
- ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026:
- Cash: $15.9B
- Marketable securities: $7.8B
- Total assets: $102.1B
- Total liabilities: $60.5B
- Debt / finance leases: about $30.3B
runako 12 hours ago [-]
The numbers overall are worse than I expected. I can't believe Serious People are talking about putting this in the market at a trilly.
> Starlink seems to be a real cash machine
It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink.
amluto 9 hours ago [-]
The use of EBITDA for Starlink is also interesting. For something like terrestrial fiber, I can imagine thinking that there’s a lot of depreciation on the books, but that most of the equipment keeps working after the depreciation period or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy, and that the right of ways and attachments don’t really depreciate. But Starlink satellites are actually gone at the end of their useful life.
I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down.
Robotbeat 6 hours ago [-]
Starlink satellites can likely have their life extended by quite a bit, like past constellation satellites did. But it doesn’t really matter as SpaceX is still upgrading capability like crazy. Starship will mean a factor of 10-100x Starlink capacity expansion.
jcattle 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, the SpaceX bet is that what you mention for terrestrial fiber
> or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy
will also hold true for cost of mass to orbit. There's a lot riding on making that prediction come true for SpaceX, hence all the CapEx going into Starship.
huevosabio 9 hours ago [-]
The space launch operating loss is like 10% of the Starlink operating income.
So Starlink is a cash cow!
aeternum 10 hours ago [-]
Looks like it's gonna be closer to 2 trilly
3eb7988a1663 6 hours ago [-]
What is a realistic scenario for how this plays out? After index funds mechanically buy SpaceX, the insider lock out expires and they all sell - how low does SpaceX go? Will reality hit and a $2T valuation instantly drops to a more "reasonable" value for an unprofitable company? Will it stay in the clouds?
Tesla seems in a world of hurt unless robots start making space centers from moon rocks, yet that is also defying gravity.
dzhiurgis 41 minutes ago [-]
Rocketlab market cap is ~$70b (ATH right now tho). Not hard to imagine SpaceX being worth 30x.
abirch 9 hours ago [-]
When do we call AI bubble? Like 2 trillion value and losing billions.
aeternum 6 hours ago [-]
No need to worry because bubbles can't exist in space
Analemma_ 12 hours ago [-]
I can't believe that my index funds are going to be looted to pay for this turd.
thephyber 11 hours ago [-]
We can thank Nasdaq for lowering the standards to fast track SpaceX into an index with only having 5% float. Soon after it lists on the major indexes, we are gonna have some turbulence.
mnicky 23 minutes ago [-]
Time to invest in some value-stocks index funds then :)
maipen 12 hours ago [-]
As if any of the marketcaps actualy reflect a company's true value.
It's never just about financials.
jfengel 12 hours ago [-]
That's kind of the whole point of a stock market. If you already had a solid revenue stream, you wouldn't need investment.
These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)".
The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
kentm 11 hours ago [-]
> The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line.
Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about.
jerlam 8 hours ago [-]
Raising the market cap of Tesla is one of the requirements for Musk's nearly $1 trillion pay package. Merging companies is a lot easier than trying to sell more cars or non-existent robots.
yibg 9 hours ago [-]
These numbers would be ridiculous even for a software play. < 20B in revenue at almost 2T valuation? That's almost 100x revenue multiples at a not so great revenue growth rate.
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
There were talks in the past about spinning Starlink out. Perhaps the thinking that led them to keep Starlink in is the same thinking about their new data center business (what they got from xAI and will grow in orbit in the future)
stainablesteel 11 hours ago [-]
putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don't think it's different
Rebelgecko 9 hours ago [-]
Spacex has been playing fuckfuck games in recent months to boost their subscriber numbers.
The day after I got my dish I got an email that the price of the base plan would double. They also sent residential subscribers "free" dishes, which a ton of people took them up on right before the price change
ACCount37 10 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised launch is only -$0.65B, given just how much were they sinking into launch infrastructure and R&D for Starship.
Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile.
pclmulqdq 6 hours ago [-]
"Printing cash" is generous given the expenses and attempted $2 trillion valuation.
alopha 12 hours ago [-]
Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it's a money pit.
abirch 9 hours ago [-]
SpaceX itself wouldn't be that bad, it's the xAI. It's going to burn through cash.
I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: "Great Product, Horrible Investment"
JeremyNT 11 hours ago [-]
What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds?
jaccola 5 hours ago [-]
Mistiming is equivalent to being wrong. And Musk is good at keeping valuations high! So who knows when it will tank.
__turbobrew__ 6 hours ago [-]
I have been thinking the same thing. I don’t want this turd in my index funds.
doctoboggan 11 hours ago [-]
short it?
tobias3 11 hours ago [-]
Choose another index where it is not included?
thephyber 10 hours ago [-]
It’s so big that it’s going to swing the markets when insiders start to liquidate after it is listed and on some indexes.
Rury 8 hours ago [-]
That alone will probably do little, due to contagion effects. Simply finding an index which excludes it might not be enough if it still shares other similar underlying stocks with indexes that do include it.
takinola 8 hours ago [-]
Can someone ELI5 Starlink revenue sources? At the core, it's an ISP (but served from space). What does Starlink have that differentiates from any other ISP? Is it because the TAM is global? That may be true at the margin, but I am sure most eligible subscribers would prefer a land-based system (eg no one in SF is cancelling their Xfinity to use Starlink) so how much is really left for them?
greycol 7 hours ago [-]
It's because they're good speeds in a lot of places that couldn't get good speeds before. It's also great for mobile work sites, i.e. construction sites, drilling camps, other b2b service businesses where a bunch of portacoms rock up to a site. Anywhere it's mildly hilly you can't actually assume you'll get a signal outside of town but a satellite dish basically guarantees that. Even if you can guarantee your in a spot long term the upfront cost of fibre or a tower may not balance out as cheaper than just eating the higher bandwidth costs.
It's also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn't appealing for competitors to build out to, so there's a lot of markets where it's a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.
jcattle 3 hours ago [-]
There's a huge number of people in developing countries (think Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Mexico) where the country just lagged on internet build out. Now in these countries the price of a subscription will be a lot lower, than the >100$ you pay in the US, but since (simplified) the only additional cost per customer is the cost of the end terminal, it's still worth it for the ARR. The break-even point per customer will just be further in the future.
Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.
dzhiurgis 32 minutes ago [-]
In NZ you can buy add-on so you can text/fb messenger/maps/weather and even apple music thru your phone via Starlink. I can't imagine this being super popular add-on, but if telco just rolls that into main offering I'd assume eventually that will be new norm.
kristiandupont 4 hours ago [-]
For one thing, just about every airline in the world is a potential customer.
stefan_ 2 hours ago [-]
I think the ISP story is a bit shitty outside some niche markets (mobile internet on airplanes and the like), but the military applications are massive. Everything is moving into drones and Starlink terminals are small enough to fit on them all, while being essentially unjammable, giving you a coarse location signal on top and plenty of bandwidth.
porphyra 12 hours ago [-]
It's pretty much expected that a rapidly growing high tech company is gonna have a lot of losses and debt right? They're just spending huge amounts of money on capex. Not doing so would be like floating minerals in Starcraft: symptomatic of bad macro.
7 hours ago [-]
bombcar 6 hours ago [-]
Now you have me imagining uThermal as CEO of SpaceX and I think it'd be worth it to see the cheese runs.
Spartan-S63 11 hours ago [-]
If they cleaved off xAI and let it die, they'd be in much better shape!
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Did you see that they are getting $15B/year from Anthropic because of what xAI built?
wongarsu 1 hours ago [-]
They are switching from digging for gold to selling shovels (capacity in their DCs). And it looks like they managed to make hay at the perfect time
redox99 11 hours ago [-]
xAI is by far their most profitable segment, receiving 1.25B a month from Anthropic.
lubos 11 hours ago [-]
That 1.25B per month is not profit
redox99 10 hours ago [-]
Assuming renting their datacenters doesn't cost them any more than running them for themselves, and plugging 15B a year of revenue (which ignores X entirely and other forms of revenue) you get 5.4B income, more than Starlink 4.4B income (which is slightly subsidized by the launch segment)
moralestapia 12 hours ago [-]
Typo: I'm sure you meant >1T.
>ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase?
While I don't think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...).
tristanj 12 hours ago [-]
Starlink is giving away the satellite dishes for free to grow customers. These dishes are expensive to manufacture and cost the company hundreds of dollars each. The estimated manufacturing cost of a Starlink standard dish is around $400.
wmf 11 hours ago [-]
That shouldn't be included in ARPU.
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
Which is a fine thing to say, but CAC vs LTV (customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value of the customer) is the underlying equation. If it costs them $150 to give away a dish, but they get, say, $300 before the user churns, they still come out ahead.
golem14 9 hours ago [-]
By making a lot of antennae, they also lower their price in the future due to the learning curve.
boelboel 12 hours ago [-]
They've been upping the subscription prices recently past few months.
12 hours ago [-]
jpkw 12 hours ago [-]
Depreciation should be quite substantial - I recall reading that the starlink sats have a 5 year life expectancy?
Jabbles 12 hours ago [-]
If any company can put profitable data centers in space, it will be SpaceX. But I doubt that any company can. The difficulties of the physics and engineering of cooling seem like they will always outweigh the advantages of keeping your data center on Earth.
I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.
I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.
This: "I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice."
They know the game very well. They know that if they manage to pump up the valuation high enough - they will be automatic money flowing in - regardless of actual valuations.
yibg 9 hours ago [-]
The unit economics of orbital DC just doesn't work with today's technology. Assuming 0 ongoing OpEx(free energy), the launch cost of the satellite itself, along with solar panels, radiators as well as the chip themselves just doesn't make sense given the ~5 year operational lifespan of both the chips and the satellites.
dzhiurgis 25 minutes ago [-]
Chips yea, but sats can last much longer. Chips are relatively lightweight, so replacing them in a new mission absolutely makes sense.
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't your pension be buying shares at $2T?
hunterpayne 7 hours ago [-]
Wait until Elon learns what black body radiation is. A vacuum is an insulator, not a heat sink.
fragmede 11 hours ago [-]
How do you price regulatory restrictions? The laws governing space are more lax than those governing how much chromium Tesla can dump into their waste water. By building in space, they get to completely sidestep any regulatory issues on Earth, like not being allowed to build what they want, wherever they want, how they want. It's annoying getting permits to do whatever on my house, but for businesses, it's a real problem.
darkwizard42 11 hours ago [-]
The biggest regulation of building in space is... where do the debris go. You are tightly monitored for how much trash reenters into the atmosphere, so there is still SOME level of regulation.
There are safety regulations that require things roughly like, "to prevent harm to planes in the air and people on the ground, either control where your satellite re-enters so or make your satellite entirely out of components that are almost certain to burn up on re-entry".
As far as I can tell, there is no environmental regulation of how many kilograms of aluminum, silicon, etc. being added to the Earth's atmosphere when a Starlink burns up during re-entry.
I don't see how that would lessen their concerns? Exactly because space is a vacuum, cooling is harder since you can't do convection.
The math still checks out though. Scott Manley did a video on it, and the top comment has some corrections: https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
dzhiurgis 24 minutes ago [-]
30% of terrestrial datacenter power use is cooling. Space cooling is easier!
stainablesteel 11 hours ago [-]
elon has a great wall of china's worth of plaques with comments exactly like this, and his companies are still worth more than their combined weight in gold
arthurofbabylon 12 hours ago [-]
It’s surprising just how low the revenue is for SpaceX. There are some 700+ companies with larger revenue figures, and yet just a small handful exceed SpaceX’s proposed valuation.
In 2026 one gets the impression that SpaceX is a huge company, among the largest in the world. It’s wild to see that its business volume is smaller than Northrop, smaller than Apple’s peripherals alone, smaller than Avnet (heard of ‘em?).
dmix 11 hours ago [-]
Uber had about $11B revenue when it went public
SpaceX is at $18.7B
darkwizard42 11 hours ago [-]
Just to keep things in perspective, Uber IPO-ed for 82.4B. SpaceX is IPOing for over 10x more.
dmix 11 hours ago [-]
Plus Uber's only increased their revenue 11->14B in the last 5yrs. SpaceX has added +$4B since 2024 and have fanciful plans in multiple markets that only a gambler like Musk would risk proposing.
urams 8 hours ago [-]
> Plus Uber's only increased their revenue 11->14B in the last 5yrs.
This is just incredibly off. A brief look at Yahoo Finance shows revenue has grown from $31.9B in 2022 -> $53.7B in trailing 12mos.
dmix 8 hours ago [-]
you're right, looks I mixed up some numbers while googling. their revenue went from 11->53b in 6yrs which was very off from my original comment
Which honestly surprises me, Uber was called a VC pump and dump scheme for years on HN before their IPO. Maybe that's the better lesson here (dont take financial advice from HN comments)
darkwizard42 6 hours ago [-]
Uber WAS a pump and dump. Insiders used the public for exit liquidity and any public shareholders got stuck with a pretty crap stock. Uber went up 100% from IPO to mid 2025, Google went up 400% in that time period (and I picked 2025 to avoid the huge AI runup we have seen).
It was hemorrhaging in many cities using extremely profitable cities like London and NYC to keep their global competitiveness.
Uber was able to pivot and become financially sound with two moves:
- Uber Eats becoming first party delivery to restaurants (it started as a limited selection of items from some restaurants and quickly evolved into a Doordash-esque competitor)
- Uber launching a 1B+ RR Ads business - margins on this are obviously incredible
Both of those combined with discipline in their ridesharing business (exiting the China market with a sale + stake, dumping their self-driving business when it became a money sink) have led to a recovery in their stock price, but it is FAR from the crazy expectations set up for VCs. I expect those in the last round didn't get a great return, but obviously folk like Benchmark exited like kings.
dmix 6 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing COVID also played a major role. The other narrative around Uber's IPO was gig-work was evil and should be banned, then pandemic hit and everyone started using uber eats constantly. Looking at their revenue growth it started doubling after 2020
eightysixfour 7 hours ago [-]
Personally, I always underestimate how much exploitation consumers are willing to experience before leaving a brand. I thought Facebook was reaching the peak of its ability to shove ads into its products in like 2011, boy was I wrong.
Uber successfully displaced most of the alternatives, slowly raised rates, and maintained operating margin while their fixed costs didn't have to scale as much. Post Travis they've, financially, nailed it.
bottlepalm 5 hours ago [-]
SpaceX easily has 10x the potential of Uber. SpaceX has its hands in so many up and coming industries.
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
SpaceX has the baggage of a bunch of elon brainfarts.
neosat 9 hours ago [-]
Revenue is not the right metric when you compare space trips to trips inside a city. The more relevant numbers are EBITDA, Operating cash flow, Profits.
kentm 11 hours ago [-]
SpaceX is incredibly exciting, but I was skeptical when XAI and Twitter were rolled into it. The S-1 here makes it even more disappointing.
I did want a piece of SpaceX but the valuation here is pretty eye watering compared to the fundamentals. I don't think I can put my money into this, although I suspect it will still do gangbusters based on hype and momentum.
Its also a real shame that SpaceX's competitors have not been able to get the same level of momentum. I know Starship has been delayed but its still hard to argue with total mass to orbit they're achieving right now.
etempleton 9 hours ago [-]
SpaceX would be an interesting IPO without XAI. It is hemorrhaging money and is in what, 6th place in the AI race while hemorrhaging X subscribers every month. Theoretically the company could focus on what is profitable and be strong fundamental company, but this is Elon we are talking about he is going to do whatever he wants to do.
kentm 9 hours ago [-]
To be honest, it could be one with XAi too. Im no fan of Musk and Grok but the deal with Anthropic pointed out by other contributors isn't nothing. And I don't think SpaceX losing money at this stage isn't quite the problem that people think it is -- as someone who as worked at companies losing money and then going on to make quite a bit. Revenue growth is there.
The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T now. Yes, you might expect that SpaceX could launch Starship, build space-based datacenters, get a good foothold on the AI market, and grow Twitter. But you don't want to pay for future performance now, you want it to be discounted because you're taking on the risk that those things don't happen. $2T feels like expecting that story has already been actualized.
amluto 6 hours ago [-]
The deal with Anthropic, even if good, doesn’t seem repeatable.
Right now, quite a few companies are discovering that the can turn inference capacity into revenue. Anthropic also can turn inference capacity into happy customers and mindshare, and they can turn lack of inference capacity into sad customers that might jump ship to OpenAI. And Anthropic wants to IPO, and they want to be as close to #1 as possible. And this whole phenomenon, industry-wide, has caused the demand for fancy chips to outstrip supply. Two years ago, DRAM was a low-margin industry, and now it’s not. If you bought a 5090 when it came out for around MSRP, you could resell it now at a healthy profit.
xAI appears to have effectively resold their datacenter at a healthy profit.
Sure, maybe xAI will try to bet that they can build another datacenter and sell/lease it at a healthy profit, but lots of players are trying to make that bet (bottlenecked by power and chip availability). And those bets could easily fail. And the players who don’t have adequate competition (SK Hynix, Micron, TSMC, etc) are going to jack up prices to try to capture more of the upside. And players like DeepSeek and Alibaba want to drive down the need for FLOPs and DRAM, because they don’t have enough and because they have a shortage of those but they don’t have a shortage of excellent AI development talent.
Oh, and China will build its datacenters on the ground, backed by more solar capacity than SpaceX can even dream of launching, and those datacenters will compete. And CXMT and Huawei will do everything in their power to ramp their own production, and SpaceX is not about to get first dibs.
On the bright side, Tesla’s AI5 finally taped out, and SpaceX will surely get some of those.
So maybe SpaceX will find $20bn of GPUs that they can resell or lease for $40bn of discounted revenue, but they could just as easily not find those GPUs or they might only get $17bn of discounted revenue and lose money on the whole affair.
electriclove 5 hours ago [-]
The assumptions are that more compute (energy, chips) is needed to get more capable models AND more capable models will result in more spending by companies. That has been correct so far.
Yes, energy and chips are some of the bottlenecks. SpaceX has a potential solution (solar powered data centers in orbit) where they are uniquely advantaged - no one can launch as much or as cheaply as they can.
amluto 5 hours ago [-]
Datacenters in space might help with energy (that’s a big if, but let’s suppose it works out). How does it help with chips? The chips are still made on Earth, but once you launch them, you add some radiation exposure and you also add a dramatic demise in five years or so. Meanwhile an RTX 3090 still sells for $500 or so.
electriclove 4 hours ago [-]
In addition to working with Intel and others, there is the Terafan initiative: https://terafab.ai/
etempleton 8 hours ago [-]
The deal with Anthropic gives me more pause about the whole market. More circular spending. They are all propping each other up making it look like they have more revenue than they really have. I think Open AIs S-1 will be just as crazy. I don't think there is any rationality or plan to all of this. AI doesn't pay for itself. It won't for a very long time.
Demand is there, money is coming in to these companies from customers. It isn't all circular.
aeternum 5 hours ago [-]
Have you used Claude Code and you still believe AI doesn't pay for itself?
atonse 7 hours ago [-]
Not really, this seems to be a very traditional "we need more cores, captain!" and "here's a datacenter with cores" rental.
Anthropic has grown 80x this year (according to their CEO). They are probably desperate to buy more inference compute for things like Claude Code, not for future investments. In the mean time, Grok seems to not have enough traction to utilize all the spare compute xAI has built with Colossus I and II.
This is one of those cases that shows that Elon is exceptionally better at atoms than he seems to be on the software side.
bmau5 11 hours ago [-]
You'll get a piece regardless if you're in index funds, as they're being strong-armed into buying at this awful price
ericd 8 hours ago [-]
I think this only applies currently for the Nasdaq index, and the only Nasdaq index fund that comes to mind is QQQ. I think fewer people are currently being hit than are worried about it.
sethops1 10 hours ago [-]
They aren't being strong-armed, NASDAQ is literally changing the rules to appease Musk and get in on the grift. Move your money elsewhere while you still can.
kentm 10 hours ago [-]
Its unfortunate that its being fast tracked and I'm really annoyed that NASDAQ is doing this. But I think that the impact should be relatively minimal, at least for the funds I hold. I really just find the transparent grift annoying.
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Hopefully their competitors will keep advancing but that just reinforces that how hard space is and that SpaceX is doing things no one else currently can.
Geeek 13 hours ago [-]
Their stated TAM is bonkers. A total of $28.5 trillion: $370B Space, $1.6T Connectivity, $26.5T in AI. With AI becoming more and more commoditized, the AI number is insane.
LarsDu88 12 hours ago [-]
With these kind of made up numbers, they might as well have simply used the fucking Kardeshev scale.
Just compute the energy output of the Sun and claim they'll build a Dyson sphere around it.
Can charge a nice hefty subscription fee for using the Sun, just like Netflix.
kentm 11 hours ago [-]
Kardashev Type II is mentioned three times in the doc.
> We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.
To be fair, he's not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.
LarsDu88 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. I guess I'll have to buy shares in case I need to pay for my Sun subscription.
Perhaps the plan all along was to build enough rockets to blot out the sun over large parts of the Earth so only the space Chads can grow crops.
dzhiurgis 17 minutes ago [-]
> Sun subscription.
I know you are just being cynical, but tbf earth already has too much sun exposure.
fragmede 11 hours ago [-]
Shhh, that's SpaceX's real play. Put a giant sun shade between the Earth and the sun, and make everyone on Earth pay for sunlight. No pay? No crops. No food. Solves global warming.
dbalatero 9 hours ago [-]
Damn, another Simpsons already did that with Mr. Burns' sun blocker.
MPSimmons 8 hours ago [-]
"Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun."
seattle_spring 12 hours ago [-]
That number is grossly inflated for every S-1. It's about as close to meaningless as you could possibly get.
For example, I used to work for an insurance-related tech company. They claimed their TAM was $9T-- the value of the entire global insurance market.
tonyhart7 12 hours ago [-]
well if they talking future when US gov print money at unbelievable rate then this is very plausible (especially if they can work on space mining)
TheAlchemist 13 hours ago [-]
Finally ! Can we end the debate about how mind blowingly profitable this company is ?
Mind you, those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden - which will run into tens of billions per year.
I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
inemesitaffia 9 hours ago [-]
>those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden
Clearly untrue. Given that's the source of the reported steep losses
TheAlchemist 7 hours ago [-]
How so ? xAI / Twitter were merged in this year - they don't show up anywhere in the financials.
inemesitaffia 2 hours ago [-]
They definitely show up.
You don't even have to read the document yourself.
Plenty of people are summarising it themselves and using AI.
The loss from Xai is over 7B
ryzvonusef 3 hours ago [-]
Would you be willing stake some money on your claim and short the stock?
vardump 12 hours ago [-]
> I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
malfist 10 hours ago [-]
Spacex is not too big to fail.
Imustaskforhelp 8 hours ago [-]
Yes but only if its added before the index funds. Let's just hope that the nasdaq and the other markets just don't take spacex (Nasdaq is literally bending its rules to accodomate SpaceX)
The worst thing is that we don't even have a say in all of this and chances are most likely that its gonna IPO and get listed on the index funds soon and once it gets into Index funds, a lot of collateral damage might happen.
I must say that I am not quite optimistic about there not existing collateral damage, there is happening a lot of corruption within financial markets in general with bending laws. The worst part is that we all would/might be the most impacted by it all
bombcar 6 hours ago [-]
Total market cap of NASDAQ 100 (QQQ) is $40 trillion, SpaceX joining that and immediately going to zero would be a 5% drop, big but not the worst we've seen.
etempleton 6 hours ago [-]
I think if SpaceX were to drop dramatically it may spook the market and lead to a lot of the NASDAQ 100 pulling back.
TheAlchemist 12 hours ago [-]
So be it. What's the alternative ? Continue a bubble ? Ride on the 'FSD by the end of the year' or 'thousands of Optimus next year' for the next 10 years ?
The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he's not cooking the books ?
Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It's just a matter of time until it unfolds.
aipatselarom 12 hours ago [-]
SpaceX and Tesla are different companies, fyi.
TheAlchemist 12 hours ago [-]
I know. They are very closely collaborating and are part of the same 'empire'. They will also go down together.
kortilla 5 hours ago [-]
They are not closely collaborating. They share essentially nothing beyond Musk.
TheAlchemist 4 hours ago [-]
Did you actually read the S-1 ?
Tesla is mentionned 87 times. And even they explicitly state that they have strategic collaboration. They supposedly biggest projects are developped together (Macrohard, Terafab - all fugazzi, but still).
Related party transactions are close to a $1 Billion in 2025.
LanceJones 11 hours ago [-]
The idea that 100s of global pension funds don't do their due diligence when investing 100s of millions or billions of their members' future retirement funds is extremely naive. With sincerity, I hope you can find a way not to be so emotional about what Musk says and be more grounded in what his companies and their employees are doing.
eightysixfour 10 hours ago [-]
Have you ever heard of a Mortgage Backed Security?
jaggederest 10 hours ago [-]
or Bespoke Tranche Opportunity, they don't say CDO any more. I mean, it's the same thing, but still.
tensor 9 hours ago [-]
Investing in SpaceX is one thing. Investing in SpaceX that is now merged with several other failed companies that each incur massive yearly additional losses.... let's see how long those funds still hold SpaceX.
ericd 8 hours ago [-]
Isn't xAI profitable after leasing out its DCs to Anthropic?
moralestapia 12 hours ago [-]
>The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
Nah.
Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.
thephyber 10 hours ago [-]
Arguably Ukraine is still alive because of StarLink.
Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.
thephyber 5 hours ago [-]
For those who don’t know, for a ~$400 terminal, UA can C&C a medium-long range drone/ plane or cruise missile which has low latency, massive global coverage, and which is resilient against EM jamming (apparently the terminal handoffs from one satellite to another make it ideal for resisting an enemy’s jamming efforts). Also the obvious: it maintains MUCH better resilient comms between front lines and HQ (RU depended on this, but they were cut off a few months ago, causing coordination chaos).
There is discussion that if Taiwan gets a similar deal to Ukraine for StarLink access, it makes the porcupine strategy much more viable.
Conversely, any country which can’t get access to it loses a massive tool in the tool chest.
And sadly, it means that if the US continues to be fickle with allies, those allies may not be able to rely on such a valuable tool.
oskarkk 12 hours ago [-]
NASA mostly runs on SpaceX, so it depends if you consider ISS to be critical. But I wouldn't say it would be mind boggling.
well_ackshually 11 hours ago [-]
Cool, nationalise SpaceX, reintegrate its costs into NASA, done.
The US would never let its access to space be cut off.
hersko 10 hours ago [-]
The US actually did just that when it retired the shuttle program. We had to rely on Russia to get to the space station.
adampunk 10 hours ago [-]
Watch lmao.
12 hours ago [-]
peder 8 hours ago [-]
Bruh. This is unhinged.
SpaceX is a good company with a ton of potential future revenue on their data center and Starlink businesses. Nothing about this company is fugazzi.
SimianSci 12 hours ago [-]
They make some incredibly outlandish claims over their total addressable market, one can only wonder where $26 trillion dollars in expected AI revenue would even come from, with 22T of that being from "enterprise" when they have no real products yet.
The whole thing looks to be proped up by Starlink which seems to be a genuinely solid business. xAI looks to be costing twice as much as it produces, and we dont even have good numbers for this yet since the deal is so new.
This feels like WeWork but if WeWork also owned a successful coffee shop.
Arodex 16 minutes ago [-]
We heard for years that other companies in the launch business (ULA, Arianespace) were just incompetent, ossified businesses, and that SpaceX was revolutionizing the field; and now we discover that SpaceX, after all their effort, is barely profitable and has to run the clock by diversifying and seeking an IPO...
How much do reusable launchers really bring down costs? Were the companies that elected not to go this way (almost all of them) incompetent or did they correctly assess the profitability problem of such a strategy? And how much does SpaceX market share is the result of actual efficiency vs. dumping the price with investor money to try to bankrupt competitors and corner the market?
TL:DR: where would Arianespace be today if they had elected to try reusable rockets and ended up at the same point as SpaceX? Would it be seen as a good gamble or a waste of taxpayer money?
(Note that SpaceX is where it is today also thanks to taxpayer money in military contracts and decades of R&D paid for by NASA and given away for free)
.)
Ekaros 12 minutes ago [-]
Also really how many satellites we actually need globally? There must be some sensible limit.
And I do not believe any other crap at all. No space mining, manufacturing, moon/mars/venus/mercury/europa bases...
datadrivenangel 12 hours ago [-]
So this confirms that SpaceX was making a lot of cash and plowing it back into R&D, and that the X/Twitter/xAI merger is concrete shoes on the good parts.
electriclove 11 hours ago [-]
Did you read that Anthropic is paying them $15B/year for use of xAI's data centers? That changes things quite a bit
austhrow743 10 hours ago [-]
Does xAI have some sort of edge over Anthropic when it comes to buying future compute?
If not, this just seems like grok not being as successful as they would have liked and then finding some other use for the compute they had bought for it while at the same time Anthropic can’t keep up with demand for claude.
electriclove 9 hours ago [-]
Your second statement is correct IMO.
Re your first statement, the problem is that there isn't enough compute out there. xAI built their own data centers (and plan to built more -> in orbit). I don't think Anthropic has done that to the same extent and it seems like they will partner with multiple vendors who can provide the compute they need.
datadrivenangel 8 hours ago [-]
And SpaceX /xAI spent almost $20 B over the last 3 years on "AI" capex and has AI capex and operations costing $10B combined in Q1 2026...
Spending 40B to make $15B/year is a decent investment actually if you can do it for more than ~3-5 years.
seydor 5 hours ago [-]
They are paying per month in a quickly shifting world.
9 hours ago [-]
pu_pe 12 hours ago [-]
148 mentions of "rocket".
773 mentions of " AI ".
ggreer 11 hours ago [-]
That's because they use other terms like "Falcon 9/Heavy", "Starship", "Super Heavy", "launch vehicle/system", "booster", "upper/lower stage", and "spacecraft".
pavlov 31 minutes ago [-]
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht granted the South Sea Company a monopoly for British trading with the Spanish South America and Pacific.
Exciting! Everybody knew there's enormous wealth in those lands. Spaniards had brought over tons of gold and silver to Europe. The famous El Dorado remained undiscovered.
So it wasn't difficult for the directors and insiders of the South Sea Company to capture the British public's imagination. Even Sir Isaac Newton invested the equivalent of millions of pounds today in the venture.
Turns out the actual monopoly was extremely limited because the Spaniards didn't want to trade with Britain. The bubble burst by 1720 and ruined thousands of people, from aristocrats to small bourgeois tradesmen.
Anyway, surely that has nothing to do with the multitrillions of wealth that await on the Moon and Mars.
Topology1 5 hours ago [-]
Am I stupid for not knowing SpaceX's official name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp.?
doener 11 hours ago [-]
"XAI, the artificial intelligence company Elon Musk created and recently merged into SpaceX, is not helping on that front. The filing shows SpaceX directed around 60% of its capital spending in 2025 to its AI division, or around $20 billion. And yet that division — which houses the chatbot Grok — lost billions last year, and only grew revenue by about 22%. That’s far below the reported revenue growth rates at frontier AI labs."
This is going to make so many smart people working in hardware soooo fkin rich. We are about to witness an absolute flood of Ex-SpaceX employees start and invest in companies targeted at space and general manufacturing and hardware. This is how we win.
erulabs 5 hours ago [-]
Feels risky to push the S-1 a day before the latest starship launch. If there is a catastrophic failure OR a perfect success it feels like it would be material here.
Also I’m concerned that if AI “works” (ie: country-of-genuses-in-a-box) that the moat of reusable rockets decreases substantially. What would stop Northrop from vibe coding their own starship?
zarzavat 29 minutes ago [-]
Rockets are mostly proprietary knowledge so you won't be able to vibecode a starship no matter how smart the AI is.
big_toast 11 hours ago [-]
"Mr. Musk or his affiliates may become aware, from time to time, of certain business opportunities ... and may direct such opportunities to other businesses in which they have invested."
"Under our charter, Mr. Musk and his affiliates are not restricted from owning assets or engaging in businesses that compete directly or indirectly with us"
Pg. 56
I think this part is interesting considering Tesla shareholders seem to have lost out on developing (x)AI (AGI?) internally.
Glohrischi 1 hours ago [-]
First first first...
Was the first to setup a Gigawatt Datacenter, than had to run it empty and rent it out despite having its own AI model which should in theory eat up all of the compute.
Then he was the first to create a Softwareonly company Macrohard, which should rewrite everything from scratch and would just need compute, but nope.
Was the first creating a company drilling tunnels, was the first creating solar roofs...
Hopefully he will be the first on Mars and doesn't come back.
Johnny_Bonk 6 hours ago [-]
Anthropic, you mean the supply chain risk anthropic as so brightly conveyed by petey
nemothekid 12 hours ago [-]
Am I reading this right?
SpaceX TAM - "Enterprise AI Applications" is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. This is a rocket company pretending it's a frontier AI lab.
throw0101c 12 hours ago [-]
Now that the paperwork is out, can anyone confirm this earlier report "Report: SpaceX IPO gives Musk unchecked power and forbids investor lawsuits":
If anyone wants to get in early on these bags Echostar(ticker: SATS) has a contract to exchange spectrum for $40B of SpaceX shares.
tristanj 11 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk owns 12.3% of Class A shares and 93.6% of Class B shares. Class B shares have 10x the voting power of class A shares. Overall Elon controls 85.1% of the voting power in the company. If Elon sells any of his Class B shares, they automatically convert into Class A shares.
Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.
> Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.
Traster 2 hours ago [-]
I guarantee the reason that number is so high is so that SpaceX can offer to merge with Tesla and the end results will be Musk having over 50% control in the combined entity. He's been very clear that's what he's been attempting to do with via his compensation packages at Tesla and now he's found a different way of acheiving the same thing.
quickthrowman 11 hours ago [-]
The S&P 500 index criteria didn’t allow this sort of nonsense starting in 2017, but they relaxed the rule again to allow dual class listings to be included in the index in 2023.
Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
rapsey 3 hours ago [-]
> I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
These companies outperform the market though.
Glohrischi 1 hours ago [-]
Hahahahahhhahh wtf...
"We believe this capability will also enable creating a petawatt-scale AI constellation through the use of lunar satellite production and a lunar mass driver for launch activities."
Someone read waaaaaay to much Sci-fi
Hey lets build a petawatt scale AI somehwere outside of our planet while people can barely survive day to day in the millions but we need to have petawatt-scale AI for these poor people because the AI will do what?
"We do not anticipate declaring or paying any cash dividends to holders of our common stock in the foreseeable future."
Sounds like 'never' to me.
kentm 9 hours ago [-]
Growth companies not paying dividends is normal and they're likely many years out from when they'd need to seriously consider it. I don't think thats a big deal.
wmf 11 hours ago [-]
Because dividends are considered failure for tech companies.
neosat 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
robofanatic 7 hours ago [-]
How will this affect TSLA share holders? Will the value go up or down?
seydor 5 hours ago [-]
We need polling to gauge the markets. Betting markets are poisoned
bayareabadboy 6 hours ago [-]
Space mining gotta be worth a lot longer term
Feel like sky is the limitidk
htrp 11 hours ago [-]
wow x.ai is a literal money incinerator
inemesitaffia 9 hours ago [-]
Remove Grok and it's a great business.
Remove AI and it's a good business.
big_toast 11 hours ago [-]
Is there any risk to SpaceX that the Musk brand pulls the market cap too far ahead now?
It's not a risk factor I see in the prospectus but seems plausible to me.
Just like with the AI company vesting, I imagine a scenario where a company seeds its own competition by realizing the monetary gains before the work is done. Maybe there's precedent in the dot com bubble. Certainly people were able to sell before the dip a la Cuban and broadcast.com. But I'm thinking more more specifically inducing competitive space ventures.
pastel8739 10 hours ago [-]
> For instance, Mr. Musk currently serves as Technoking and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla
Sorry, what?
HerbManic 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah... he gave himself that title back in 2021.
nickburns 6 hours ago [-]
This thread contains a significantly higher concentration of dumb than the typical front page post. Gee, I wonder why.
gigatexal 11 hours ago [-]
Who is gonna buy at the IPO and why or why not? (Assumes you read the S1).
I did. I’m not buying. lol I won’t get an allocation but I also want to see where this shakes out. So in 6 months time if starlink is the gem that people say then sure.
I think he finds a way to trade inflated SpaceX stock to o buy Tesla and call it a day.
bigbuppo 12 hours ago [-]
So, a significant amount of self-dealing, and Elon Musk has an 85.1% voting share in the company. That sounds like a really great thing. There is no sarcasm in that previous statement. None at all.
randallsquared 12 hours ago [-]
One of the major reasons for fans of space exploration to be concerned about all this was the dilution of control that seemed inherent in an IPO, but since that seems to be fixed, I don't hate the idea any more.
seydor 5 hours ago [-]
The irony is many think this is an advantage. They don't want the ignorant masses to steer his companies.
10 hours ago [-]
k2xl 10 hours ago [-]
Very surprised to see SpaceX valued higher than OpenAI.
hersko 10 hours ago [-]
They launched more mass to space than every other entity on planet earth combined last year.
hnburnsy 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
12 hours ago [-]
iandanforth 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tehlike 5 hours ago [-]
Simply put, never bet against Elon.
Don't try to short it. Sit it out if you feel the urge.
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
laughs in twitter
tehlike 4 hours ago [-]
investors in twitter are made whole.
Traster 1 hours ago [-]
Seeing both OpenAI and SpaceX trying to yeet themselves into public markets as fast as possible I've got to wonder if the music is slowing. There's a neat rocket company with a satellite business in here somewhere, but it's massively over-shadowed by totally underwater social media site and a failed AI experiment, both of which have been bailed out. I think the best thing you can say is that atleast we aren't aware of any other massively unprofitable bad bets Musk has made that he's going to need to bail out soon.
In some ways this looks like Meta. Meta throws off a tonne of money with it's ad business, but you have to discount it because Zuck has control and an attitude that it's his toy. So you have to discount the ad revenue business because there's a good chance that Zuck just pisses it up the wall. The difference here is you've got a speculative idea that SpaceX might eventually become a massive revenue driver, but Musk is already pissing the money up the wall.
I get why this makes sense for Musk - get SpaceX public, use the stock to merge with Tesla, it gets all his companies under 1 roof and gives him enough voting rights to do whatever the hell he likes. It makes sense for SpaceX early shareholers - they need liquidity.
I do not know what sense it makes for any investor. The absolute best you can argue is it's going to be a meme stock.
Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
That's basically exactly this ^
wickedly underrated film. my all time favorite in the skynet genre.
the vocoder speech at the end is just exquisite.
Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.
So net you are looking at finance expenses of 7-11 billion per year. The electricity costs will be significant on top of that, but harder to get a solid read on.
Net of everything, spacex may be getting a 14-28 percent yield before paying for electricity. After electricity/insurance/data/taxes/other expenses - I’d guess it’s anywhere between 0% and 7% yield.
Odds are good that Anthropic abandons the deal before the depreciation schedule completes. Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
So, it's 10B, with $4b of that being attributed to a 5 year depreciation. The rest of the facility probably has a depreciation of around 20 years, and you can easily swap out GPU's, TPU's, Trititum, Tesla's own GPU's, as they start failing, so the normal depreciation curve only "kinda applies here".
There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.
Electricity is coming from Nat Gas Turbines, so again even though you have a some depreciation on the equipment there, you are getting it for far below meter prices.
So, from my math, he gets ROI on the chips in 3 months, and ROI on the entire facility in 9 months? That's literally the best investment of all time.
Who is "he"? SpaceX has $20bn of debt and $9bn in "other financing" corresponding to "obligations related to certain AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions."
I'll keep the below for integrity sake:
Well, i'm sure SpaceX bought Xai using some kind of prefered share/debt financing, but that's not to say that XAI had the original debt financing.
We can never know what the exact details, and the exact financing is on this debt. Maybe it's tied to Elon's Tesla Shares, Maybe it's tied to a convertible, maybe it is actual "loans" from a bank. Even at $9b in debt, and you naivly assume they are paying 10% (Def not 20% as OP claimed), you are paying $900m a year, for the entirety of xAi. Including that in the calculations to rent out the entire compute is folly. Not only is 900M not directly attributed to c1, cause it's split between c1, c2 and all the training runs, but you can never verify the interest. And even then, one month of this deal pays for the whole year of interest expense.
So go ahead and lower my estimate by 10%... doesn't make a difference.
If only there was some SEC filing available disclosing additional information about the 6-months $20bn bridge loan which was on the news four weeks ago…
Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.
Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.
But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.
Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.
I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.
The news from the S1 is that they're renting both (see OP).
Essentially, they are using most of C2 for Grok5. That training run is coming to an End, and they will be leasing more capacity. So taht 1.25b per month will go up to around $1.5B-$2B per month as they finish grok 5.
Edit: from cofounder of Anthropic: "will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June." https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
So the 1.25B is for c1, and the revenue will scale into c2. No idea how much scale, but c2 is almost double the compute? So potentially $3b a month, but probably closer to $2.5B since they get a discount.
5 year old H100s are now completed depreciated but are being rented out at higher rates than when they were new.
> Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
I'd LOVE a way to be on the other side of that bet.
If only there was another way outside of buying into all the other Elon risks associated with SpaceX.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-to-rent-all-ai-capa...
I don't know about Cursor.
Reality is that this is all to show some more (theorical) revenue and will be scrapped 6 months from now.
At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?
https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...
> Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
I suspect your definition of a lousy place to build infrastructure in might overlap with my definition of a relatively good place to live.
Which is quite close to the standard NIMBY attitude: "I want good grid, cheap electricity and other infrastructure, but not in my backyard. Either someone else's, or somewhere where no one lives at all."
Can't you see the fundamental problem with that attitude? We mostly live in densely populated regions. We do need roads, rail and power plants to sustain our way of living, you too.
It's true that Anthropic didn't buy as much compute as OpenAI. But OpenAI's compute purchases are one of the largest investments in human history.
It's also true that they are now scrambling for compute, and might be paying more than OpenAI paid. But now they have the revenue to justify it!
To me it is the opposite of "speaking out of both sides of his mouth" - he's been consistent in his "we won't be reckless in buying compute too far ahead of demand" message.
He didn't make compute deals until he saw the growth necessary to justify them. As a result, they're paying over-the-odds compared to if they'd have make deals earlier. Maybe that was a poor business decision, but I'm not sure how it represents speaking out of "both sides of his mouth"? Sounds like he was honest.
And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.
He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.
And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.
His math is wrong though. He still claims H100s are worthless but in fact they are worth more now than when they were new.
And everything I've read from him is just.. weird? Like he has an anti-AI agenda and he interpreters everything through that?
Look at his latest public piece: https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/
He is complaining that there are no 1GW+ data centers, with evidence like this:
> For example, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported in October 2025 that Amazon’s Indiana-based (allegedly) 2.2GW Project Rainier data center was “operational,” but only seven out of a planned 30 buildings were actually operational, and her comment of “with two more campuses [of indeterminate capacity] underway.” This comment was buried two videos and 600 words into a piece that declared the data center was “now operational,” with the express intent of making you think the whole thing was operational.
But if you read the report that "buried" comment is far from buried - the whole thing is about how it is still under construction!
Of course 1GW data centers don't all come online at once! You get them online in the parts you can as soon as you can!
Ed Zitron is constantly wrong and writes like a child having a tantrum, I don’t understand why you take him seriously?
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...
From a previous comment of mine – the quotes are all from a single article:
He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person.
> I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence.
> I am so very bored of having this conversation
> I don't care about this number!
> Shut the fuck up!
> This isn't the early days of shit.
> Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine.
> $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic.
> This isn’t real business! Sorry!
> He said in one of his stupid and boring blogs that
> This man is full of shit! Hey, tech media people reading this — your readers hate this shit! Stop printing it! Stop it!
> It's here where I'm going to choose to scream.
> Dario Amodei — much like Sam Altman — is a liar, a crook, a carnival barker and a charlatan, and the things he promises are equal parts ridiculous and offensive.
> Why are we humoring these oafs?
> Despite Newton's fawning praise
> Nobody talks like this! This isn’t how human beings sound! I don’t like reading it!
> Ewww.
> I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.
> I know, I know, I'm a hater, I'm a pessimist, a cynic, but I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product
> I know this has been a rant-filled newsletter, but I'm so tired of being told to be excited about this warmed-up dogshit.
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
> I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously.
When I read this kind of thing, it’s very apparent that this is being driven entirely by spite not insight. He’s just so angry about everything. There are 57 exclamation marks in this article!
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085885#43086361
Pay too much attention to this kind of thing and it will poison your mind.
So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?
>Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
>South Korean April exports rise 48.0% y/y as chip boom extends
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-april...
To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.
Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.
Anthropic is also profitable now.
By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.
They have something like 70% margin on inference.
https://archive.is/aKFYZ
You can quibble about the exact numbers, but I think it’s fairly clear at this point that inference is profitable with decent margins. Like you say, unit economics are more interesting than the profitability of the company as a whole.
A few of them also have locked in power agreements.
Almost none of them have the expertise to build anything. Some of them are even outsourcing that to geezer tech and consulting shops.
It's not going to go well.
While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario's part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better.
This won't hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won't look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.
But while this is a "good problem to have" it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable.
Now, I'm totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!
Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it would have been better to drink his own Kool Aid!
Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.
Worst case there wouldn't be anyone interested in renting it either, they would have tens of billions of useless data centers fastly losing value.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
2025:
- Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024
- Operating loss: -$2.6B
- Net loss: -$4.9B
- Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B
- Operating cash flow: $6.8B
- Capex: $20.7B
Segment breakdown:
- Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B adj. EBITDA
- Space / launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss
- AI / xAI / X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss
Starlink metrics:
- Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026
- ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026:
- Cash: $15.9B
- Marketable securities: $7.8B
- Total assets: $102.1B
- Total liabilities: $60.5B
- Debt / finance leases: about $30.3B
> Starlink seems to be a real cash machine
It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink.
I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down.
> or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy
will also hold true for cost of mass to orbit. There's a lot riding on making that prediction come true for SpaceX, hence all the CapEx going into Starship.
So Starlink is a cash cow!
Tesla seems in a world of hurt unless robots start making space centers from moon rocks, yet that is also defying gravity.
These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)".
The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.
My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line.
Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about.
The day after I got my dish I got an email that the price of the base plan would double. They also sent residential subscribers "free" dishes, which a ton of people took them up on right before the price change
Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile.
I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: "Great Product, Horrible Investment"
It's also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn't appealing for competitors to build out to, so there's a lot of markets where it's a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.
Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.
>ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026
Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase?
While I don't think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...).
I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.
I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...
[2] https://spacenews.com/anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...
They know the game very well. They know that if they manage to pump up the valuation high enough - they will be automatic money flowing in - regardless of actual valuations.
As far as I can tell, there is no environmental regulation of how many kilograms of aluminum, silicon, etc. being added to the Earth's atmosphere when a Starlink burns up during re-entry.
cf. https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/forty-year-old-loopho... https://aas.org/about/governance/society-resolutions/atmosph...
The math still checks out though. Scott Manley did a video on it, and the top comment has some corrections: https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
In 2026 one gets the impression that SpaceX is a huge company, among the largest in the world. It’s wild to see that its business volume is smaller than Northrop, smaller than Apple’s peripherals alone, smaller than Avnet (heard of ‘em?).
SpaceX is at $18.7B
This is just incredibly off. A brief look at Yahoo Finance shows revenue has grown from $31.9B in 2022 -> $53.7B in trailing 12mos.
Which honestly surprises me, Uber was called a VC pump and dump scheme for years on HN before their IPO. Maybe that's the better lesson here (dont take financial advice from HN comments)
It was hemorrhaging in many cities using extremely profitable cities like London and NYC to keep their global competitiveness.
Uber was able to pivot and become financially sound with two moves: - Uber Eats becoming first party delivery to restaurants (it started as a limited selection of items from some restaurants and quickly evolved into a Doordash-esque competitor) - Uber launching a 1B+ RR Ads business - margins on this are obviously incredible
Both of those combined with discipline in their ridesharing business (exiting the China market with a sale + stake, dumping their self-driving business when it became a money sink) have led to a recovery in their stock price, but it is FAR from the crazy expectations set up for VCs. I expect those in the last round didn't get a great return, but obviously folk like Benchmark exited like kings.
Uber successfully displaced most of the alternatives, slowly raised rates, and maintained operating margin while their fixed costs didn't have to scale as much. Post Travis they've, financially, nailed it.
I did want a piece of SpaceX but the valuation here is pretty eye watering compared to the fundamentals. I don't think I can put my money into this, although I suspect it will still do gangbusters based on hype and momentum.
Its also a real shame that SpaceX's competitors have not been able to get the same level of momentum. I know Starship has been delayed but its still hard to argue with total mass to orbit they're achieving right now.
The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T now. Yes, you might expect that SpaceX could launch Starship, build space-based datacenters, get a good foothold on the AI market, and grow Twitter. But you don't want to pay for future performance now, you want it to be discounted because you're taking on the risk that those things don't happen. $2T feels like expecting that story has already been actualized.
Right now, quite a few companies are discovering that the can turn inference capacity into revenue. Anthropic also can turn inference capacity into happy customers and mindshare, and they can turn lack of inference capacity into sad customers that might jump ship to OpenAI. And Anthropic wants to IPO, and they want to be as close to #1 as possible. And this whole phenomenon, industry-wide, has caused the demand for fancy chips to outstrip supply. Two years ago, DRAM was a low-margin industry, and now it’s not. If you bought a 5090 when it came out for around MSRP, you could resell it now at a healthy profit.
xAI appears to have effectively resold their datacenter at a healthy profit.
Sure, maybe xAI will try to bet that they can build another datacenter and sell/lease it at a healthy profit, but lots of players are trying to make that bet (bottlenecked by power and chip availability). And those bets could easily fail. And the players who don’t have adequate competition (SK Hynix, Micron, TSMC, etc) are going to jack up prices to try to capture more of the upside. And players like DeepSeek and Alibaba want to drive down the need for FLOPs and DRAM, because they don’t have enough and because they have a shortage of those but they don’t have a shortage of excellent AI development talent.
Oh, and China will build its datacenters on the ground, backed by more solar capacity than SpaceX can even dream of launching, and those datacenters will compete. And CXMT and Huawei will do everything in their power to ramp their own production, and SpaceX is not about to get first dibs.
On the bright side, Tesla’s AI5 finally taped out, and SpaceX will surely get some of those.
So maybe SpaceX will find $20bn of GPUs that they can resell or lease for $40bn of discounted revenue, but they could just as easily not find those GPUs or they might only get $17bn of discounted revenue and lose money on the whole affair.
Yes, energy and chips are some of the bottlenecks. SpaceX has a potential solution (solar powered data centers in orbit) where they are uniquely advantaged - no one can launch as much or as cheaply as they can.
Demand is there, money is coming in to these companies from customers. It isn't all circular.
Anthropic has grown 80x this year (according to their CEO). They are probably desperate to buy more inference compute for things like Claude Code, not for future investments. In the mean time, Grok seems to not have enough traction to utilize all the spare compute xAI has built with Colossus I and II.
This is one of those cases that shows that Elon is exceptionally better at atoms than he seems to be on the software side.
Just compute the energy output of the Sun and claim they'll build a Dyson sphere around it.
Can charge a nice hefty subscription fee for using the Sun, just like Netflix.
> We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.
To be fair, he's not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.
Perhaps the plan all along was to build enough rockets to blot out the sun over large parts of the Earth so only the space Chads can grow crops.
I know you are just being cynical, but tbf earth already has too much sun exposure.
For example, I used to work for an insurance-related tech company. They claimed their TAM was $9T-- the value of the entire global insurance market.
Mind you, those numbers don't take into account YET the Twitter debt / xAI merger burden - which will run into tens of billions per year.
I just can't, can't wait until this whole Musk fugazzi finally blows up.
Clearly untrue. Given that's the source of the reported steep losses
You don't even have to read the document yourself.
Plenty of people are summarising it themselves and using AI.
The loss from Xai is over 7B
Be careful what you wish for. The collateral damage would be mind boggling.
The worst thing is that we don't even have a say in all of this and chances are most likely that its gonna IPO and get listed on the index funds soon and once it gets into Index funds, a lot of collateral damage might happen.
I must say that I am not quite optimistic about there not existing collateral damage, there is happening a lot of corruption within financial markets in general with bending laws. The worst part is that we all would/might be the most impacted by it all
The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he's not cooking the books ?
Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It's just a matter of time until it unfolds.
Tesla is mentionned 87 times. And even they explicitly state that they have strategic collaboration. They supposedly biggest projects are developped together (Macrohard, Terafab - all fugazzi, but still).
Related party transactions are close to a $1 Billion in 2025.
Nah.
Nothing critical is running on top of any of SpaceXAI's offerings.
Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.
There is discussion that if Taiwan gets a similar deal to Ukraine for StarLink access, it makes the porcupine strategy much more viable.
Conversely, any country which can’t get access to it loses a massive tool in the tool chest.
And sadly, it means that if the US continues to be fickle with allies, those allies may not be able to rely on such a valuable tool.
The US would never let its access to space be cut off.
SpaceX is a good company with a ton of potential future revenue on their data center and Starlink businesses. Nothing about this company is fugazzi.
The whole thing looks to be proped up by Starlink which seems to be a genuinely solid business. xAI looks to be costing twice as much as it produces, and we dont even have good numbers for this yet since the deal is so new. This feels like WeWork but if WeWork also owned a successful coffee shop.
How much do reusable launchers really bring down costs? Were the companies that elected not to go this way (almost all of them) incompetent or did they correctly assess the profitability problem of such a strategy? And how much does SpaceX market share is the result of actual efficiency vs. dumping the price with investor money to try to bankrupt competitors and corner the market?
TL:DR: where would Arianespace be today if they had elected to try reusable rockets and ended up at the same point as SpaceX? Would it be seen as a good gamble or a waste of taxpayer money?
(Note that SpaceX is where it is today also thanks to taxpayer money in military contracts and decades of R&D paid for by NASA and given away for free) .)
And I do not believe any other crap at all. No space mining, manufacturing, moon/mars/venus/mercury/europa bases...
If not, this just seems like grok not being as successful as they would have liked and then finding some other use for the compute they had bought for it while at the same time Anthropic can’t keep up with demand for claude.
Re your first statement, the problem is that there isn't enough compute out there. xAI built their own data centers (and plan to built more -> in orbit). I don't think Anthropic has done that to the same extent and it seems like they will partner with multiple vendors who can provide the compute they need.
Spending 40B to make $15B/year is a decent investment actually if you can do it for more than ~3-5 years.
Exciting! Everybody knew there's enormous wealth in those lands. Spaniards had brought over tons of gold and silver to Europe. The famous El Dorado remained undiscovered.
So it wasn't difficult for the directors and insiders of the South Sea Company to capture the British public's imagination. Even Sir Isaac Newton invested the equivalent of millions of pounds today in the venture.
Turns out the actual monopoly was extremely limited because the Spaniards didn't want to trade with Britain. The bubble burst by 1720 and ruined thousands of people, from aristocrats to small bourgeois tradesmen.
Anyway, surely that has nothing to do with the multitrillions of wealth that await on the Moon and Mars.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/the-spacex-ipo-filing-has-...
Also I’m concerned that if AI “works” (ie: country-of-genuses-in-a-box) that the moat of reusable rockets decreases substantially. What would stop Northrop from vibe coding their own starship?
"Under our charter, Mr. Musk and his affiliates are not restricted from owning assets or engaging in businesses that compete directly or indirectly with us"
Pg. 56
I think this part is interesting considering Tesla shareholders seem to have lost out on developing (x)AI (AGI?) internally.
Was the first to setup a Gigawatt Datacenter, than had to run it empty and rent it out despite having its own AI model which should in theory eat up all of the compute.
Then he was the first to create a Softwareonly company Macrohard, which should rewrite everything from scratch and would just need compute, but nope.
Was the first creating a company drilling tunnels, was the first creating solar roofs...
Hopefully he will be the first on Mars and doesn't come back.
SpaceX TAM - "Enterprise AI Applications" is 6T. The other 22T enterprise AI. This is a rocket company pretending it's a frontier AI lab.
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/report-spacex-ip...
Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.
> Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.
Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
These companies outperform the market though.
"We believe this capability will also enable creating a petawatt-scale AI constellation through the use of lunar satellite production and a lunar mass driver for launch activities."
Someone read waaaaaay to much Sci-fi
Hey lets build a petawatt scale AI somehwere outside of our planet while people can barely survive day to day in the millions but we need to have petawatt-scale AI for these poor people because the AI will do what?
What Elon what willl your Petawatt AI do for us?
* "SpaceX IPO Scandal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388640
* "SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648226
Sounds like 'never' to me.
Feel like sky is the limitidk
Remove AI and it's a good business.
It's not a risk factor I see in the prospectus but seems plausible to me.
Just like with the AI company vesting, I imagine a scenario where a company seeds its own competition by realizing the monetary gains before the work is done. Maybe there's precedent in the dot com bubble. Certainly people were able to sell before the dip a la Cuban and broadcast.com. But I'm thinking more more specifically inducing competitive space ventures.
Sorry, what?
I did. I’m not buying. lol I won’t get an allocation but I also want to see where this shakes out. So in 6 months time if starlink is the gem that people say then sure.
I think he finds a way to trade inflated SpaceX stock to o buy Tesla and call it a day.
Don't try to short it. Sit it out if you feel the urge.
In some ways this looks like Meta. Meta throws off a tonne of money with it's ad business, but you have to discount it because Zuck has control and an attitude that it's his toy. So you have to discount the ad revenue business because there's a good chance that Zuck just pisses it up the wall. The difference here is you've got a speculative idea that SpaceX might eventually become a massive revenue driver, but Musk is already pissing the money up the wall.
I get why this makes sense for Musk - get SpaceX public, use the stock to merge with Tesla, it gets all his companies under 1 roof and gives him enough voting rights to do whatever the hell he likes. It makes sense for SpaceX early shareholers - they need liquidity.
I do not know what sense it makes for any investor. The absolute best you can argue is it's going to be a meme stock.