By Al Root
SpaceX is meeting with aerospace and tech analysts in Boca Chica, Texas, ahead of its trillion-dollar IPO.
Some numbers have started to leak out. They are impressive. (And Barron's did a decent job projecting a few of them.) SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment about the numbers.
Total sales in 2025 amounted to about $16 billion and 2026 sales should be about $25 billion. That's not that surprising based on launch frequency and number of Starlink subscribers.
Starlink ended 2025 with more than nine million paying customers and should have about 12 million by the end of 2026. Starlink is SpaceX's space-based broadband product, using more than 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, according to multiple published reports.
Starlink's Ebitda profit margins are north of 60%. That's a little surprising, although it might not apply to the Starlink division and not the entire organization. That is high for an aerospace and defense company. Barron's thought 50% was likely. TransDigm's Ebitda margins are closer to 50%.
That also means that Starlink generated close to $7 billion in 2025 Ebitda. SpaceX generates a lot of cash, which it invests in things like Starship, a fully reusable rocket designed to cut costs to reach space by up to 90%. (SpaceX's Falcon nine rocket cut costs to reach orbit by more than 90% versus the Space Shuttle.)
Starlink is an incredible franchise, but an IPO valuation of up to $2 trillion will depend on Elon Musk convincing the analysts that AI data centers in space will be a thing. Musk is raising money in an IPO partly to finance space-based AI computing he hopes will become cheaper than terrestrial data centers in only a few years.
The company ended 2025 with about $25 billion in cash and $50 billion in liabilities. The liability number is a little surprising. But most of those liabilities appear to come from xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, which SpaceX essentially acquired in February. xAI is spending billions building data centers, and it merged with debt-laden X, formerly Twitter, in 2025.
Some of the SpaceX-specific liabilities appear to be tied to prepayments for launch. Those aren't really debt. SpaceX just got the cash up front.
Musk also looks to have full control over the company with a dual-class of stock. That really isn't a surprise. No one expected Musk to cede any control of SpaceX. He has been battling for more control over Tesla stock for years.
Eventually, the SpaceX IPO registration statement will be made public by the SEC. That could be days or weeks away. It's getting closer, with the analyst meeting already under way.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 21, 2026 18:20 ET (22:20 GMT)
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