The market has been getting excited about the upcoming SpaceX initial public offering (IPO), but there’s been scant information about the details until lately. The company finally released its investor prospectus last week, giving followers a peek into what’s actually happening at SpaceX. Here are the important details every potential investor needs to know before buying SpaceX stock.

1. Starlink is leading revenue

SpaceX is a rapidly growing business, but the rate is steady, not spectacular. Revenue increased by about 33% in 2025 and by about 15% year over year in the 2026 first quarter.

Since its merger with Elon Musk’s xAI last year, the company has several revenue streams. The core SpaceX rocket-launching business, which generated $4.1 billion in revenue in 2025; the Starlink broadband business, which generated $11.4 billion in revenue; and the xAI artificial intelligence (AI) business, which generated $3.2 billion.

Starlink business revenue increased 32% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, and subscribers more than doubled from 5 million at the end of 2024 to 10.3 million at the end of 2025. Average revenue per user declined from $86 to $66 as the company released new, lower-priced products, especially outside of North America.

2. AI is leading losses

Turning all that revenue into profit isn’t so easy. SpaceX reported a $4.9 billion loss in 2025 and a $4.3 billion loss in the 2026 first quarter, up from a $528 million loss in last year’s first quarter.

The main loss is coming from the AI business, which is spending massively to keep up with its peers. Management cited expenses related to graphics processing units (GPUs) and data center infrastructure build-out as the major costs of development, along with compensating workers. The company had $20 billion total in capital expenditures (capex) in 2025, $12 billion of which went to xAI, and it reported a $2.5 billion operating loss in the first quarter. xAI’s large language model (LLM), Grok, competes with other large ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Alphabet‘s Gemini. Alphabet, incidentally, has a stake in SpaceX worth 6.1% of the company at last report.

SpaceX’s rocket business is also operating at a loss due to increased spending, and revenue decreased year over year in the first quarter.

The Starlink business, though, is profitable, with a 32% year-over-year increase in revenue in the first quarter and $1.2 billion in operating income.

3. A massive estimated market

Musk and team believe they have “the largest actionable total addressable market (TAM) in human history.” It identifies the TAM at $28 trillion, which includes:

• $370 billion in space-related activities, or the core SpaceX business.
• $1.6 trillion in connectivity and broadband, or the Starlink business.
• $26.5 trillion in AI, or the xAI business. The main opportunity it sees here is in what it calls “enterprise applications,” which accounts for $22.7 trillion of the TAM. Enterprises are businesses.

These estimates exclude Russia and China, and they are just that — management-generated estimates. So investors should keep a level head.

4. Elon Musk gets control

One of the main points people have been talking about is Musk’s control of the company. The structure awards him 85% of the shares, giving him complete voting control. The company plans to have a dual-class structure, with class A shares issued mostly to the public and class B shares going to Musk and other insiders.

On the one hand, that could be a dangerous situation for shareholders, who won’t have a say in what happens in the company, including the ability to install new management if they don’t believe the company is being managed well or if it changes its mission.

On the other hand, investors interested in SpaceX are likely interested because of Elon Musk. His vision has guided this company to where it is today, and SpaceX shareholders will be those who buy into the vision and have confidence in Musk’s leadership.