SpaceX Just Went Public And Told Investors Not To Obsess Over Quarterly Earnings

Most companies go public and start sweating the next three months. SpaceX did the opposite on Friday.

Its second-in-command told new investors to stop watching the calendar.

"I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings," President Gwynne Shotwell said.

The Biggest IPO Ever

When SpaceX went public, it raised $75 billion. That is the largest amount on record. It values the firm near $1.77 trillion.

The price makes it the seventh most valuable company in America. It now sits ahead of both Meta and Musk's other firm, Tesla. It is even worth more than every U.S. aerospace and defense company put together.

Some on Wall Street think the math is a stretch. The price works out to about 40 times this year's expected sales. That is steep for any company. Stack it against profits and it looks steeper still, at about 175 times adjusted earnings.

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What's Actually Paying The Bills

Strip away the hype and one business carries the firm. That business is Starlink, its satellite internet service.

Starlink has more than 10 million users. They get online through a web of more than 9,000 satellites. It is the cash register that funds everything else.

The rockets are the moat. A moat is the edge that rivals cannot easily copy. SpaceX's Falcon fleet has flown about 80% of all the mass sent to orbit since 2023. Almost all of those flights used reused boosters.

That reuse is the whole trick. SpaceX lands the same booster and flies it again. That has cut the cost of reaching orbit by more than 90% since the old Space Shuttle days.

The Costly Part

Then there is the spending. SpaceX poured $12.7 billion into AI last year. It spent another $7.7 billion in just the first three months of 2026.

That money feeds a few big bets. It funds xAI, a chip project with Tesla called Terafab, and data centers it rents out to Anthropic and Google. Its giant Starship rocket has cost about $15 billion so far.

Starship is the priciest bet of all. The rocket stands taller than the Statue of Liberty. NASA has already hired it to help land astronauts on the Moon.

Shotwell knows it sounds wild. "Elon jokes that we make the impossible, we just make it late," she said. The pitch is that all this spending drives costs down later and opens new markets. The bill, though, is due now.

What To Watch

One more thing investors are signing up for. Musk runs the show. He holds more than 80% of the voting power. He even has final say over his own removal.

His stated goal is not a dividend. It is a million people living on Mars.

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