SpaceX $60 Billion Acquisition of Cursor

Understanding SpaceX's Two Trillion Dollar Story: Why Can Musk Always Plan Every Move in Advance?

Flying to the Universe, Vast and Boundless

Author | Cao Siqi

Editor | Jingyu

On June 12, the day SpaceX was officially listed, Musk chose to go to the Starship base in Texas and ring the Nasdaq opening bell remotely with hundreds of employees.

On site, he said with his familiar self-deprecating style: "If someone had told me back then that there would be a day like today, I would probably think that person was high. Because at the time, I myself thought this company would fail."

On this day, SpaceX officially landed on Nasdaq, with an issue price of $135, raising about $75 billion; it rose immediately upon opening, surging past $176 intraday, and its market cap briefly stood at $2 trillion.

From being forced to start a business in 2002 because he couldn't buy a rocket, to completing the largest IPO in human commercial history, there are many counter-intuitive and counter-consensus stories in this 24-year journey.

This company nominally builds rockets, but the rocket business is not profitable; its most prominent achievement is rocket recovery, but what supports the valuation are two other stories—Starlink, and the "Space Computing" just written into the prospectus.

We have compiled 15 of the most representative small stories to help you build a more comprehensive understanding of SpaceX.

1. SpaceX's Starting Point Came from a "PR Move" by a New Business Elite

In 2001, Musk, who had just cashed out of PayPal, wanted to fund a public opinion project called "Mars Oasis" out of his own pocket: spend tens of millions of dollars to send a mini greenhouse to Mars, take photos of green plants growing on red soil, and thereby encourage Congress to increase NASA's budget.

But he was stuck on shipping costs. European rockets were too expensive, and three trips to Moscow to buy retired intercontinental missiles were dismissed as amateurish.

In subsequent public speeches and media interviews, Musk stated that after being frustrated, he believed that what was blocking humanity's path to Mars was neither public will nor Congressional budget, but the price of rockets itself. Thus, "fundraising for NASA" became "making rockets cheaper ourselves."

In 2002, SpaceX was officially established.

2. For the First Six Years, the Company Was Constantly "Failing"

From 2002 to 2008, the first three launches of Falcon 1 all failed.

In those days, all know-how for building rockets was locked within national space systems. SpaceX could neither buy blueprints nor hire people. Musk later joked when recounting this: he became the company's chief engineer because "excellent people were unwilling to come."

More cruel was the physical attribute of rockets: they cannot be fully debugged on the ground, and the only way to learn is to launch, explode, and try again. The "three consecutive defeats" were the tuition fee for a company learning aerospace with live ammunition—only this tuition was priced in tens of millions of dollars, and Musk's money was only enough for four attempts.

3. The Fourth Launch Succeeded, Opening the Era of "Commercial Aerospace"

On September 28, 2008, the fourth launch of Falcon 1 succeeded—the first liquid-fuel rocket developed by private funds to enter Earth's orbit.

Before this, "aerospace" was by default a national game: the government spent the money, and the system did the work.

Three months later, NASA handed a $1.6 billion International Space Station cargo contract (CRS) to this company that had just survived death. "Commercial Aerospace" as an industry was officially born on this day.

4. New Gameplay in Commercial Aerospace

Traditional aerospace procurement is "cost-plus": contractors report how much they spend, and the government adds a profit—spending more means earning more, and no one has the motivation to save money.

In the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS/CRS) project, NASA gave SpaceX a fixed-price contract: a lump sum, keep what you save, bear the overspend yourself. This seemingly boring procurement clause is the true institutional starting point of commercial aerospace; it first made "making rockets cheaper" a profitable business.

SpaceX's consistent obsession with cost later on was half nature, half forced by this contract.

5. Reusable Technology: Making Clients Willingly Pay for "Unreliable Technology"

On December 21, 2015, the Falcon 9 (Falcon 9) first stage rocket successfully landed back on the ground for the first time—exactly 13 years after the company's establishment.

Before this, SpaceX's obsession with recovery had gone through long trials and failures: in 2010, the first two flights of Falcon 9 attempted to recover the first stage using parachutes—the rocket disintegrated during re-entry before the parachute could open. Starting in 2013, they switched to a retro-propulsion scheme, and for the next two years, there were nearly ten attempts: some crashed hard on the sea surface, some exploded or tipped over on barge decks, and not a single one returned intact.

But these trials were almost never self-funded special tests, but rather piggybacked on customer paid launches—the same rocket both executed the mission and conducted experiments. The customer's payload was sent to orbit in the first half, money and goods settled; the first stage rocket after delivery, by industry convention, was garbage to be thrown into the sea, and SpaceX used it to practice landing on the way.

Musk's "calculation" was: if it explodes, it's garbage exploding; if it succeeds, aerospace history is rewritten. So, in fact, SpaceX used NASA's orders as a scholarship to finish the "reusable" degree for free. Today, Falcon 9 mission success rate is about 99.4%, and in 2025, the Falcon 9 series launched 165 times, with booster recovery failing only 3 times.

Falcon 9 rocket conducting commercial launch | Image source: SpaceX

6. SpaceX Today: Starlink Makes Money to Support AI

The prospectus shows that SpaceX's total revenue in 2025 was $18.7 billion, with a net loss of $4.9 billion.

But broken down by segment, the story is completely different: the connectivity business where Starlink resides contributed about $4.4 billion in operating profit in a year, the only profitable segment of the entire company; the space business where rockets reside had a small loss of about $660 million—mainly because about $3 billion was poured into Starship R&D.

The real big hole is xAI consolidated into the accounts: an operating loss of about $6.4 billion in a year, swallowing up all of Starlink's profit and still not enough.

In other words, if looking only at "Old SpaceX" (rockets + Starlink), it is already a profitable company; what makes it "loss-making" again is precisely the AI it bought for the next story.

7. Starlink is the "Internal Client" Musk Laid Out in Advance for Reusable Rockets

In January 2015, Musk publicly announced the Starlink plan, which is a "broadband network in the sky" composed of thousands of low-orbit small satellites by SpaceX, selling internet services to ground users—especially in places like the sea, wilderness, and remote areas where fiber optics and base stations cannot reach.

In December of the same year, Falcon 9 successfully landed for the first time. That is to say, before "cheap rockets" were proven, the "client for cheap rockets" had already been internally initiated.

This is not a coincidence, but two halves of the same arithmetic problem: the global rocket launch market is only five or six billion dollars a year, and has not changed much in the past decade. So cheap capacity put into this market simply cannot be full; conversely, to lay a network of thousands or tens of thousands of satellites globally, without cheap capacity, the accounts simply don't add up.

8. Starship Hasn't Succeeded Yet, Its "Buyer Market" Has Already Changed Once

The same story of betting in advance happened with the next-generation heavy rocket Starship.

In 2014, SpaceX laid the foundation for the Starship base in Boca Chica, Texas—that year, Falcon 9 had not yet succeeded in a single recovery. The previous generation had not landed, and the next generation had already started construction.

More notably is the change in clients: Starship's initial narrative was "people"—Mars colonization, space travel, which Musk talked about for many years; after the concept of Space Computing rose, Starship's top client quietly changed to "data centers."

The logic hasn't changed: Falcon 9 is paired with about 20 tons of low Earth orbit capacity, and the client is Starlink; Starship's planned capacity is 100-150 tons (low Earth orbit, planned value), tourists cannot consume such large capacity, but equipment needed for space data centers might.

Every time the rocket gets bigger, Musk has to "create" a commercially larger client for them.

Starship V3 first launch, carrying a total of 33 Raptor V3 boosters | Image source: SpaceX

9. "Chopsticks Catching Rockets"

On October 13, 2024, during the fifth test flight of Starship, two mechanical arms on the launch tower caught the slowly falling booster in mid-air, flooding the internet.

Before this, Falcon 9 proved that rockets could "come back" and "fly again"—but every time they returned, they had to be salvaged from the sea and returned to the factory for overhaul, with cycles counted in weeks, essentially still "fix and reuse." What Starship wants is another thing: like an airplane, land, inspect, refuel, and take off again.

Landing legs are dead weight, occupying capacity; landing far away requires transportation. Letting the booster return directly to the launch tower's embrace means the place it lands is the place it takes off from again—the intermediate links are compressed to the limit, and the turnover target changes from "weeks" to "hours."

The so-called "chopsticks catching rockets" actually points out the ultimate form of rockets in SpaceX's eyes: from being recoverable to "flight-like operation."

10. May Not Need "Domestic Starlink," But Definitely Need "Domestic Capacity"

"Chinese version of Starlink" is a popular narrative, but there is a often overlooked fact: Starlink solves the problem of "ground base stations cannot reach"—sea, wilderness, vast and sparsely populated areas; while China happens to have the strongest ground communication network coverage globally, the feel of Starlink-style services domestically is naturally limited.

The real proposition is at another level: satellites have more than one use—remote sensing, navigation, future Space Computing, each requires sending a large amount of things to space cheaply and frequently.

In other words, China may not need to replicate the Starlink "product," but cannot bypass the "capacity" behind Starlink. For China's commercial aerospace, "whether to have a network in the sky" is not the most core question, "whether to have the hands to weave the network" is.

11. Breaking the "Never IPO" Flag

SpaceX was once Silicon Valley's most steadfast "never IPO" company. Musk's public reason was that the short-termism of capital markets is incompatible with ultra-long-term goals like Mars.

The turning point happened in the fourth quarter of last year: Starlink's user growth and revenue per user both saw ceilings, while the capital expenditure for the new story of "Space Computing" was so large that only the public market could handle it.

The prospectus disclosed that in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the capital expenditure for AI business exceeded the sum of the space and connectivity segments.

So, listing is not a celebration of the end, but a financing move for the next round of gambling.

12. Space Computing is a "Consensus," Details Are Still Unknown

Although the concept of Space Computing is new, it is a super consensus rapidly reached by the tech industry in the past half year, with almost no one publicly singing a contrary tune.

But asking one layer deeper, it seems there is no common answer for all technical details:

What does a space data center look like? There is no public product definition. What data does it calculate, where does the data come from? No one knows.

Borrowing the classic three elements of the AI industry—algorithms are running wild on the ground, but "data" and "computing deployment" are still blank in the space context. Pre-training or inference? The two have completely different requirements for power supply, heat dissipation, and networking, and the corresponding satellite designs are also completely different. A direction priced by trillions of funds, even the product form has not converged yet.

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