Musk Says SpaceX Has Ordered 100 GW a Year of Solar Manufacturing Equipment From a Little-Known German Company, “For Starmind to Create a Sentient Sun”
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Elon Musk said Tuesday evening that SpaceX has ordered 100 GW a year of solar manufacturing equipment from Singulus Technologies, a 325-person machine maker in Kahl am Main, Germany, and that the equipment is "for Starmind to create a sentient sun." The post on X went up at 6:47 PM Eastern on November 10 and had been seen about 4.9 million times by Wednesday. The full text: "SpaceX has ordered 100 GW/year of HJT solar manufacturing equipment from Singulus in Germany. This is for Starmind to create a sentient sun." Starmind is SpaceX’s planned fleet of solar-powered satellites built to run AI computing in orbit.
Singulus told its own version a little earlier, in a release that came out after the German market closed. It signed a supply contract with SpaceX for a turnkey production line that makes heterojunction (HJT) solar cells. The first line is worth more than EUR 60 million (about $66 million at this week’s exchange rate), ships in the first half of 2027, and supports satellite production at SpaceX’s plant in Bastrop, Texas. The partnership, Singulus said, is meant to scale "to support more than 100 GW of production equipment." Singulus did not say per year. The per-year figure is Musk’s. Mike Nicolls, SpaceX’s senior vice president for Starlink, said the deal "gives us a high-performance manufacturing path for solar cells for our Starmind satellites."
Read plainly, the order is SpaceX betting it can make solar cells faster than any factory on Earth does today, and the 100 GW a year is Musk’s number for where the partnership is headed. The limit is that one EUR 60 million line is all Singulus has signed for.
What 100 GW a year would mean
The United States installed 43.2 GW of solar in all of 2025, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie, and had about 298 GW installed in total by the middle of this year. Their forecast is roughly 44 GW a year of new additions through 2030. Musk’s 100 GW a year is 2.3 times what the whole country installed last year. It is about a third of every solar panel the country has ever put up, each year, so three years of it would equal the entire American fleet.
The number fits what SpaceX told investors before its June listing. Its filing describes a long-term goal of putting up to 100 GW of power into orbit each year, which the company itself said would take thousands of launches a year. The satellite design SpaceX has published carries a computer drawing up to 250 kW at peak, so 100 GW of cells a year is enough for about 400,000 such satellites a year before any losses. SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to operate up to one million Starmind satellites, and the first launches are planned for the second half of 2027.
On Wednesday Musk added why he counts orbital solar differently: "100GW in space is roughly equal to 800GW on Earth," he wrote, because ground solar "must be paired with massive batteries to continue powering compute at night."
The company on the other end of the order
Singulus was founded in 1995 as a management buyout from Leybold and made its name building the machines that press CDs and DVDs. It still lists optical disc lines among its products, next to coating equipment for solar cells, semiconductors and medical packaging. It had 325 employees at the end of September.
Its 2025 revenue was EUR 48.3 million, about $53 million, with a net loss of EUR 14.2 million and EUR 6.2 million of cash at year-end. The first SpaceX line alone is 1.24 times that whole year of sales, and 72% of the EUR 83 million the company forecasts for 2026. SpaceX is also the company’s lender. The partnership began in March, and Singulus says SpaceX provided "significant funding" in March and again in October, when Singulus took out a subordinated secured loan of about EUR 22.75 million to repay its former largest shareholder.
The stock did what tiny stocks do when Musk names them. Singulus closed Tuesday at EUR 12.70 on Xetra, before the release and the post. On Wednesday it opened at EUR 18.80, touched EUR 27.30 and closed at EUR 26.50, up 108.7% on 799,838 shares traded against 147,033 the day before. On Thursday afternoon in Frankfurt it was down 17.4% at EUR 21.90. With 8,896,527 shares outstanding, the company was worth EUR 113.0 million on Tuesday night, EUR 235.8 million on Wednesday night and EUR 194.8 million at Thursday afternoon’s price. Wednesday alone added EUR 122.8 million of market value, 2.0 times the size of the order that caused it. The shares closed at EUR 1.465 on January 2, so even after Thursday they are up 14.9 times this year.
A retiree who read the post
Gary is 67, a retired aerospace engineer with $2.4 million, most of it in a rollover IRA, and a weakness for solar videos on YouTube. He read Musk’s post Tuesday night and decided to put $25,000 into Singulus, 1.0% of his money, through a broker that trades German shares. At Wednesday’s exchange rate of 1.1063 dollars to the euro, that is EUR 22,598.
If Gary bought at Wednesday’s open of EUR 18.80, he got 1,202 shares for EUR 22,597.60. At the close they were worth EUR 31,853.00, or $35,239, a gain of $10,239, 41.0% in one session. After Thursday’s drop they were worth EUR 26,323.80, or $29,122, a gain of $4,122, 16.5%.
If he read the morning headlines first and bought near the afternoon high of EUR 27.30, he got 827 shares for EUR 22,577.10. At Thursday afternoon’s EUR 21.90 they were worth EUR 18,111.30, or $20,036. That is a loss of $4,940, 19.8%, inside 24 hours.
If he bought at Wednesday’s close of EUR 26.50, the most common moment for a reader who saw the "stock doubled" stories at dinner, he got 852 shares. Thursday left them at $20,642, a loss of $4,336, 17.4%.
A stock that doubles in a day on one order is telling you the market has already priced the orders that have not been signed. It is also telling you that the next day can take a fifth of it back, which is what Thursday did.
What a SpaceX holder should take from it
For SpaceX shareholders the order is small change. SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in its June listing, and the first Singulus line costs about $66 million. SpaceX traded at $143.78 Thursday morning, 6.5% above its $135 IPO price and 28.8% below its record close of $201.80 on June 16. What the order says is that Starmind has moved from a filing to a factory contract with a delivery date. That is all it says. Neither company has disclosed the first line’s output or the efficiency of the cells.
The bottom line
Gary’s three outcomes ran from a $10,239 gain to a $4,940 loss on the same $25,000, decided by the hour he clicked. That is the whole lesson of a 100% day in a company with EUR 48.3 million of annual sales: the price is set by who is chasing it, and the chasers leave as fast as they came. If the Starmind story is one you want to own, size it so Thursday does not matter. At 1.0% of a $2.4 million portfolio, a total loss costs 1.0%. In an IRA the gain is untaxed until withdrawal and the loss earns no deduction, so the account cushions nothing on the way down. Keep the position at the size where you can read the next Musk post for the news in it, and not for your balance.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
AJ spent 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics, that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.
