Elon Musk at SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas, May 27, 2025.
Marvin Joseph | Washington Post | Getty Images
SpaceX filed for an initial public offering a week ago, but Elon Musk is already stirring up turmoil.
Days before the reusable rocket maker is scheduled to begin pitching its story to investors, Musk appeared on the SpaceX-owned social network X late Wednesday to detail the company’s recent partnership with rival AI startup Anthropic. His comments included potentially important aspects of their deal that were not included in SpaceX’s more than 300-page IPO filing.
Earlier this month, SpaceX announced it was leasing unused computing power at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee to Anthropic. Last week’s prospectus said Anthropic “has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity increases at reduced rates in May and June 2026.” The filing also states that “either party may terminate the agreement upon 90 days’ notice.”
“SpaceX has not committed to lease Colossus for years,” Musk wrote in an X-Post on Wednesday night, calling the agreement a “180-day lease with mutual cancellation after that with 90 days’ notice.” But the prospectus says nothing about the deal potentially ending within the next few months.
Whether Anthropic plans to pay SpaceX $15 billion a year for the next three years or drastically reduce spending over a much shorter period of time will be an important consideration for prospective investors. SpaceX’s total revenue in 2025 will be just $18.7 billion, and while selling computing power from its data centers will add an entirely new revenue stream, SpaceX will compete with so-called neo-cloud providers such as: Nevius and coreweave.
Some investors are already concerned about backing a company valued at more than $1 trillion while participating in the largest IPO in history and spending billions of dollars in a quarter. Musk’s post raises further questions about the company’s financial disclosures.
“Oddly enough, either Musk is right and the S-1 is seriously misleading, or the S-1 is right and Elon is keeping his old secret,” Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert on corporate governance, wrote in an email. “But more than that, it’s going to confuse investors who are trying to value SpaceX as much as possible.”
Anthropic declined to comment for this story, and SpaceX representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Disclosures about humanity aren’t the only part of SpaceX’s filing that analysts say isn’t complete.
Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, listed a number of omissions from the prospectus’ post-issuance report.
“Important disclosures are missing,” Granda wrote. He pointed to the “subscriber churn” and “unit economics” of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 partially reusable rocket, as well as the “granularity of the AI segment,” and wrote that the company did not disaggregate subscriptions to the chatbot Grok or X, nor did it provide details on “utilization of the 1.0 GW of compute deployed.”
Economics of AI
The AI part of SpaceX is particularly difficult for investors to evaluate.
Musk founded xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI in the rapidly growing generative AI market. Although xAI remains a niche player in the market, Musk valued the business at $250 billion in February, when he merged xAI with SpaceX, giving the combined company a valuation of $1.25 trillion.
SpaceX’s capital spending totaled $10.1 billion in the first quarter of this year, more than doubling from the same period last year, of which $7.7 billion was related to xAI, according to the prospectus. The AI division, now known as SpaceXAI, posted an operating loss of $2.5 billion in the quarter.
In choosing to lease its computing power to Anthropic, SpaceX acknowledged that its AI models and services were not generating significant demand and the company was not in a position to leverage expensive infrastructure.
Musk said in a post on X Wednesday night that SpaceX wants to be able to shorten the contract in case it needs capacity.
“We will not leave them alone and will provide them with a reasonable exit,” Musk wrote, referring to Anthropic. “But I said if computing got really demanding, we might have to go back at some point.”
SpaceX bull Cathie Wood of Ark Invest touted Musk’s move to monetize the computing infrastructure that has cost billions of dollars to build xAI.
“Thanks to the deal with Anthropic, XAI (now SpaceXAI) is pivoting from massive losses on Colossus to significant profitability as a neocloud,” Wood wrote after the deal was announced on May 9. At the time, she estimated the move would generate annual revenue of $5 billion to $6 billion.
That was before the IPO filing showed even bigger numbers, and long before Mr. Musk spoke out this week, effectively admitting the prospectus was flawed.
Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said SpaceX should “submit a tweet with an explanation” if it modifies S-1 before delivery. He said in an email that while Musk’s posts do appear to contradict the filing, the differences may be “reconcilable.”
“Typically, this is handled by filing a separate update with the (Securities and Exchange Commission),” she wrote.
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