Elon Musk is pushing back against one of the market's biggest concerns about SpaceX stock.
In a post on X on Sunday, Musk said outsiders are severely underestimating the company's capital spending efficiency. His reply was aimed at a post from Milk Road Stocks that cited analyst Kyle Reidhead's estimate: SpaceX will need to invest roughly $470 billion in capital expenditures over the next five quarters.
Reidhead's calculation is based on SpaceX's target, given during its third-quarter earnings call, of reaching at least 13 gigawatts of computing capacity by the end of 2027. In his breakdown, Nvidia would receive 83% to 89% of that spending. According to Teslarati, SpaceX ended the quarter with 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate computing capacity and guided fourth-quarter capital spending to a range of $35 billion to $40 billion.
Musk did not provide specific figures to support his view, but the earnings call serves as his argument. Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said that at current pricing, new computing capacity pays for itself in less than a year, and Musk said the payback period could shorten to six months next year. Based on that payback pace, Reidhead estimates that of the $470 billion in total investment, about $230 billion could come from operating cash flow and about $6 billion from SpaceX's existing cash reserves of roughly $90 billion, leaving about $180 billion to be raised through debt.
Musk confirmed last week that SpaceX has completed a new $40 billion debt financing to purchase GPUs. Building ground-based computing capacity is not the final goal; it is a source of funding for the push into orbital computing. On Friday, responding to a SpaceX model chart built by Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Musk wrote: "Compared to orbital compute, ground compute is nothing," adding that the scale of orbital computing deployed each month will "probably catch up to ground compute by the end of 2028, and will greatly exceed ground compute in 2029."
Maguire's model shows how steep the funding pressure of this path is: capital spending climbs from $88 billion this year to $290 billion in 2027 and $369 billion in 2028; the company burns $77.8 billion in cash this year and $122.6 billion next year, not reaching net cash inflow of $114.9 billion until 2028. Musk's assessment of the model: "I think we can do better."
The orbital computing segment is being implemented through the Starmind project. According to information on SpaceX's space security page, SpaceX plans to operate up to 1 million AI satellites, with satellites networked in clusters of about 10, each with link bandwidth of about 10 Tbps; as early as late 2027, the Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, will begin delivering thousands of satellites in bulk. Musk said each Starmind spacecraft carries more than 250 kilowatts of solar power.
Whether this vision can be realized depends on launch capacity. Maguire's model assumes 250 Starship launches in 2028, compared with just 2 this year and 38 next year. The more critical near-term test is financial performance: SpaceX has guided first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion, more than double the $14.58 billion recorded in the third quarter; Musk retweeted and confirmed this revenue guidance again on Sunday morning.
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