SpaceX skeptics concerned as Musk comments diverge from IPO filing
Elon Musk is photographed at SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas.
Marvin Joseph | The Washington Post | Getty Images
SpaceX filed for an IPO a week ago, and Elon Musk is already creating confusion.
Days before the reusable rocket maker is slated to start pitching its story to investors, Musk took to social network X (which is owned by SpaceX) late Wednesday to explain details of the company’s recent partnership with competing AI startup Anthropic. His comment included a potentially material aspect about their deal that wasn’t included in SpaceX’s 300-plus page IPO filing.
Earlier this month, SpaceX said it was leasing unused compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee to Anthropic. Last week’s prospectus said that Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX “$1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee.” The filing also noted, “The agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
In his X post Wednesday night, Musk wrote, “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years,” and called the pact a “180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter.” The prospectus, however, said nothing about the deal potentially ending in a matter of months.
Whether Anthropic is slated to pay SpaceX $15 billion a year for the next three years or will be spending substantially less over a much shorter period represents a major consideration for prospective investors. SpaceX’s total revenue in 2025 was just $18.7 billion, and selling compute capacity out of its data center adds an entirely new revenue stream, while putting SpaceX in competition with so-called neocloud providers like Nebius and CoreWeave.
Some investors are already leery of buying into the largest IPO on record, and backing a company that’s valued at over $1 trillion while burning billions of dollars a quarter. Musk’s post raises further questions about the company’s financial disclosures.
“The odd thing is that either Musk is correct and the S-1 is materially misleading, or the S-1 is correct and Elon is up to his old hijinx,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on corporate governance, in an email. “But more than that it’s confusing to investors who are trying (best they can) to put a valuation on SpaceX.”
Anthropic declined to comment for this story, and representatives from SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Anthropic disclosure isn’t the only one in SpaceX’s filing that analysts have highlighted as less than thorough.
Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, catalogued an array of omissions in a report following the publishing of the prospectus.
“Critical disclosures are missing,” Granda wrote. He pointed to “subscriber churn” as well as “unit economics” for the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s partially reusable rocket, and “AI segment granularity,” writing that the company didn’t break out subscriptions to Grok or X or provide details on the “utilization rate on 1.0 GW of deployed compute.”
Economics of AI
The AI part of SpaceX is particularly challenging for investors to value.
Musk founded xAI in 2023 to try and take on OpenAI in the booming generative AI market. While xAI remains a niche player in the market, Musk valued the business at $250 billion in February, when he merged it with SpaceX in a deal that gave the combined entity a valuation of $1.25 trillion.
During the first quarter of this year, SpaceX’s capital expenditures totaled $10.1 billion, more than doubling from a year earlier, with $7.7 billion of that tied to xAI, according to the prospectus. The AI unit, now known as SpaceXAI, recorded a $2.5 billion operating loss in the quarter.
In opting to lease its compute capacity to Anthropic, SpaceX was acknowledging that its own AI models and services haven’t inspired great demand, and that the company isn’t in position to take advantage of its costly infrastructure.
Musk said in his post on X Wednesday night that SpaceX wanted to be able to cut the deal short in case it needs the capacity.
“We won’t leave them hanging and will provide a reasonable off-ramp,” Musk wrote, referring to Anthropic. “But if compute gets super tight I said we might need it back at some point.”
Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood, a SpaceX bull, touted Musk’s move to monetize compute infrastructure, which cost xAI billions of dollars to build.
“Thanks to its deal with Anthropic, XAI, now SpaceXAI, is pivoting from massive losses at Colossus to significant profitability as a neocloud,” Wood wrote after the deal was announced on May 9. She estimated at the time that the move would bring in $5 billion to $6 billion in annual revenue.
That was before the IPO filing laid out an even bigger number, and well before Musk chimed in this week, effectively acknowledging that the prospectus has shortcomings.
Ann Lipton, a law professor at University of Colorado, said that, as SpaceX amends its S-1 ahead of the offering, it should “file the tweet with an explanation.” She said by email that Musk’s post does appear to contradict the filing, but that the differences may be “reconcilable.”
“Usually this is handled by filing an update separately with the SEC,” she wrote.
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