Elon Musk’s SpaceX officially began its march to Wall Street on Wednesday, releasing the S-1 documents needed for its long-awaited IPO.
S-1 has not yet released the key numbers that investors have been waiting for, such as SpaceX’s estimated stock price and expected public offering price, but it has certainly provided them. For the first time, we take a close look at the financial details and strategy behind Musk’s rocket company and AI business xAI.
The biggest points to be gleaned from the submitted documents are:
Mr. Musk’s motivation for building a “human colony”
Making life “multiplanetary” is at the forefront of SpaceX’s mission, and Mr. Musk has huge financial incentives to make it happen. That’s 1 billion shares of SpaceX.
For Musk to access the package, among other market capitalization milestones, SpaceX must establish a “permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants,” according to the filing.
Once this milestone is reached, Musk will still need to remain employed by SpaceX, and his shares will be split into 15 tranches.
Still, this is a highly unusual reward trigger for an unusual IPO.
Read more about SpaceX’s IPO
Musk’s compensation could be worth up to $737 billion
Musk could earn a big salary if he builds interplanetary cities and orbital data centers.
Based on the number of shares implied in the filing, Musk’s two performance awards could be worth roughly $737 billion if fully vested.
That includes about $583 billion from a 1 billion-share stock award if SpaceX reaches a market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent colony on Mars. That also includes about $154 billion for about 302 million separate shares tied to the orbital data center, which provides 100 terawatts of computing per year, and SpaceX’s market cap milestone of about $6.6 trillion.
Anthropic is paying a lot of money for SpaceX’s computing
Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for access to the rocket company’s computing power, according to filings. This equates to approximately $15 billion in revenue from Anthropic.
This computing refers to SpaceX’s Colossus and Colossus II, massive supercomputers and data centers designed for training AI.
The cloud and computing services contract begins in May 2026, according to the filing.
Mr. Musk has huge voting power
Stock voting rights mean that each share owned gives the shareholder one vote on eligible matters. The S-1 revealed that Mr. Musk, who serves as the company’s chief executive officer, chief technology officer and chairman of the board, holds 85.1% of the total voting rights on company matters based on his 5,569,053,075 shares of stock.
A screenshot of the SpaceX S-1 filing shows how much voting power Elon Musk has depending on the number of shares he owns. Kady Thompson
Grok’s capital investment was higher than Starship’s
The S-1 reveals sectoral capital spending for the three months ending March 31, with $1 billion in space, $1.3 billion in connectivity, and $7.7 billion in AI.
This means spending on xAI’s projects such as Grok was higher than that of SpaceX’s rocket division, which includes the Super Heavy and Starship rockets.
The company also poured money into AI last year, with $3.8 billion in space and $12.7 billion in AI in 2025.