Elon Musk thinks SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) will have $1 trillion in revenue in 2031. Its revenue last year was just shy of $19 billion. According to CNBC, Goldman Sachs forecasts $470 in 2030. Morgan Stanley’s forecast is $330 billion. In other words, Musk has an immensely large target based on mainstream expectations. What is not clear is how he gets there.
Let’s look at how this $1 trillion forecast would work. Last year, Starlink had revenue of just over $11.4 billion, or 61% of SpaceX’s total. Space rockets had revenue of $4.1 billion. xAI’s revenue was $3.2 billion.
Set aside profits, because Musk’s $1 trillion target was not based on profitability.
(America’s company last year, based on revenue, was Amazon at $716 billion. It grew at a 12% year-over-year rate. But, Amazon is 18 times the size of SpaceX based on revenue.)
Starlink has fewer than 10,000 satellites in orbit. Several forecasts put that number at 40,000, but it is not entirely certain as to when. Based on current SpaceX revenue, could that number reach $700 billion? If the number of satellites rises 4x, that doesn’t seem likely.
SpaceX rocket launches were 165 last year. Can this division’s revenue rise 100X? That would be earth-shattering.
xAI is the weakest of the SpaceX divisions. It also has the most competition among SpaceX’s businesses, which is led by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and at least a dozen other companies in the race to grow and become profitable. Infrastructure costs for data centers will rise into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars a year. SpaceX is not highly profitable today, and most of those profits come from Starlink. xAI’s market share makes it unlikely it will become a major presence in the AI sector.
Can SpaceX’s revenue reach $1 trillion in five years? It is hard to see how.
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