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If you’re headed out for a protracted weekend and craving for a superb seaside learn, think about this buzzy title: Form S-1 Registration Statement Under the Securities Act of 1933: Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
AKA, the SpaceX IPO prospectus. This factor slaps.
While these sorts of filings are sometimes dry, the SpaceX S-1 reveals key particulars about the funds and operations of essentially the most worthwhile non-public firm, run by the world’s wealthiest individual, forward of what’s prone to be the most important public inventory itemizing ever.
Over greater than 270 pages, it lays out the mission of Elon Musk’s area exploration-slash-AI-slash-social-media firm. The objective of an S-1 is to present traders all the small print they want about an organization’s enterprise mannequin, together with potential threat elements and audited monetary statements.
Here are among the wildest things we realized.
(*5*)
‘The Moon, Mars, and beyond’
Musk’s Mars obsession has been a part of the SpaceX mission since he based the corporate in 2002, and it appears he’s as dedicated as ever. The phrase “Mars” seems 63 occasions within the doc, together with beneath the “executive compensation” part. In brief, the SpaceX board granted Musk an award of 1 billion restricted shares on the situation that he guides the corporate to 2 milestones: a $7.5 trillion market capitalization, and “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
Now, you is likely to be questioning, “What even is a financial incentive for someone who already effectively has limitless funds?” And yeah, your guess is nearly as good as ours.
SpaceX didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Musk can be SpaceX’s chief government, chief expertise officer, and chairman of the board. And he appears to have gone out of his means to make sure he gained’t must cope with any of the shareholder brush-backs he’s confronted at Tesla. The submitting reveals Musk holds the vast majority of super-voting shares generally known as Class B inventory.
Musk will be capable to “elect, remove or fill any vacancy” among the many high 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, in accordance with the submitting, which suggests he’d must vote to fireside himself.
SpaceX spent practically $700 million on Tesla “Megapack” merchandise between 2024 and 2025 and a further $131 million on Cybertrucks, the slab-sided electrical pickups that Tesla has struggled to sell.
Such “related party spending” isn’t uncommon, however there’s all the time been a little bit of thriller surrounding Cybertruck gross sales and what number of had been going to Musk’s different operations. Business Insider estimates the $131 million buy would equate to roughly 1,183 to 1,813 autos, or between 6% and 9% of all Cybertruck gross sales final 12 months.
The firm misplaced nearly $5 billion final 12 months, on income of $18.7 billion. And the losses grew by one other $4.3 billion within the first three months of this 12 months.
The losses are largely on account of SpaceX’s merger with Musk’s xAI, which is burning by way of billions to assemble its “Colossus” information facilities in Tennessee.
The AI division final 12 months misplaced $6.4 billion whereas bringing in $3.2 billion in income. And its $12.7 billion in capital expenditures had been greater than 3 times bigger than that of SpaceX’s core rocket division.
In a piece of the submitting known as “Our Challenges,” SpaceX mainly acknowledges that loads of its ambitions are, properly, a stretch. At one level the corporate says it goals to deploy “orbital AI compute satellites” — basically, information facilities in area — “as early as 2028.”
Later, it says that that goal, together with plans to “establish a lunar economy, transport humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars, and develop human augmentation systems,” will contain “unproven” applied sciences or “technologies that do not exist.”
As such, these tasks “may not achieve commercial viability.”
Nonetheless, it states elsewhere within the submitting, “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.”