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If you’re headed out for a long weekend and yearning for a good beach read, consider this buzzy title: Form S-1 Registration Statement Under the Securities Act of 1933: Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
AKA, the SpaceX IPO prospectus. This thing slaps.
While these kinds of filings are often dry, the SpaceX S-1 reveals key details about the finances and operations of the most valuable private company, run by the world’s wealthiest person, ahead of what is likely to be the biggest public stock listing ever.
Over more than 270 pages, it lays out the mission of Elon Musk’s space exploration-slash-AI-slash-social-media company. The purpose of an S-1 is to give investors all the details they need about a company’s business model, including potential risk factors and audited financial statements.
Here are some of the wildest things we learned.
‘The Moon, Mars, and beyond’
Musk’s Mars obsession has been part of the SpaceX mission since he founded the company in 2002, and it seems he’s as committed as ever. The word “Mars” appears 63 times in the document, including under the “executive compensation” section. In short, the SpaceX board granted Musk an award of 1 billion restricted shares on the condition that he guides the company to two milestones: a $7.5 trillion market capitalization, and “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
Now, you might be wondering, “What even is a financial incentive for someone who already effectively has limitless funds?” And yeah, your guess is as good as ours.
SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Musk will be SpaceX’s chief executive, chief technology officer, and chairman of the board. And he seems to have gone out of his way to ensure he won’t have to deal with any of the shareholder brush-backs he’s faced at Tesla. The filing shows Musk holds the majority of super-voting shares known as Class B stock.
Musk will be able to “elect, remove or fill any vacancy” among the top shareholders on the board and “have the power to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval, including election of all our directors, and to control our business and affairs.”
Musk controls 85% of the shareholder vote, according to the filing, which means he’d have to vote to fire himself.
SpaceX spent nearly $700 million on Tesla “Megapack” products between 2024 and 2025 and an additional $131 million on Cybertrucks, the slab-sided electric pickups that Tesla has struggled to sell.
Such “related party spending” isn’t unusual, but there’s always been a bit of mystery surrounding Cybertruck sales and how many were going to Musk’s other operations. Business Insider estimates the $131 million purchase would equate to roughly 1,183 to 1,813 vehicles, or between 6% and 9% of all Cybertruck sales last year.
The company lost almost $5 billion last year, on revenue of $18.7 billion. And the losses grew by another $4.3 billion in the first three months of this year.
The losses are largely due to SpaceX’s merger with Musk’s xAI, which is burning through billions to construct its “Colossus” data centers in Tennessee.
The AI division last year lost $6.4 billion while bringing in $3.2 billion in revenue. And its $12.7 billion in capital expenditures were more than three times larger than that of SpaceX’s core rocket division.
In a section of the filing called “Our Challenges,” SpaceX basically acknowledges that a lot of its ambitions are, well, a stretch. At one point the company says it aims to deploy “orbital AI compute satellites” — essentially, data centers in space — “as early as 2028.”
Later, it says that that objective, along with plans to “establish a lunar economy, transport humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars, and develop human augmentation systems,” will involve “unproven” technologies or “technologies that do not exist.”
As such, those projects “may not achieve commercial viability.”
Nonetheless, it states elsewhere in the filing, “we believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers.”
