Analyst: SpaceX Gears Up for IPO, AI Business Raises the Biggest Questions

Analyst Robert Cyran said Elon Musk's SpaceX is preparing to go public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. However, its prospectus is deeply trapped in the "black hole" of AI hype, with a considerable portion of the issues stemming from xAI.

xAI has generated enormous capital expenditure requirements, burning through $7.7 billion in the first three months of this year. This represents a more than threefold increase compared to the same period last year and accounts for over three-quarters of all SpaceX investments. Furthermore, the operating loss of $2.5 billion in the first quarter is sufficient to drag the entire company into a loss.

In addition, SpaceX has reached an agreement with Anthropic, under which Anthropic is leasing idle computing power from Musk's Colossus data center at a cost of approximately $1.3 billion per month. Given that xAI's revenue over the past 12 months barely exceeded $3 billion, the main business of this division has essentially become leasing out idle servers. The real issue is that SpaceX's core AI business has not achieved significant progress. Grok lags behind competitors in various benchmark tests, with first-quarter revenue growing less than 13% year-over-year. Meanwhile, Anthropic is projected to grow at five times that rate on a single-quarter basis. In a sense, SpaceX is indeed a "rocket ship." But from a financial perspective, it still struggles to reach "escape velocity." (Jin10)