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SpaceX builds and launches rockets and spacecraft, and sells internet service from space.
SpaceX is a rocket company that also runs a satellite internet business. It designs and builds its own rockets and spacecraft, then uses them to carry satellites, cargo, and people into orbit for customers that include NASA, the U.S. military, and commercial satellite operators. It also flies its own Starlink satellites, which beam broadband internet down to dishes on the ground.
The rocket business works like a delivery service. Customers pay SpaceX to lift something heavy to a precise spot in space, and the hard part is doing it reliably and cheaply. SpaceX's big edge is reusability: its Falcon 9 boosters fly back and land, then get refurbished and flown again, which pushes down the cost per launch. That let it win a huge share of the global launch market and become the default ride to orbit for many customers. Starlink is the newer and faster-growing engine. SpaceX launches thousands of small satellites into low orbit, and those satellites talk to a small dish at your house, which gives you internet even where cables and cell towers never reached. Customers pay for the dish and a monthly subscription. The service has grown fast, especially in rural areas and in places with poor or no broadband, and it is now a major source of revenue alongside launches.
Elon Musk started the company in 2002 with $100 million of his own money, cashed out from PayPal. His goal was huge: make humans a species that lives on other planets. The idea came after he tried and failed to buy a Soviet missile to send a small greenhouse to Mars, and he saw that government space spending was shrinking. So he decided to build a cheaper rocket company himself.
By 2008 the money was running out fast after three failed launches of the first rocket. The fourth launch finally worked, and just weeks later a last-minute NASA contract brought in the cash the company needed to stay alive. From that point, its path changed completely.
SpaceX got a rocket booster back to the ground in one piece, a big step toward flying rockets again instead of throwing them away. That is the whole trick to making spaceflight cheaper.
The company flew a rocket that had already been to space before, relaunching used hardware for the first time. Reuse stopped being a nice idea and became real.
SpaceX carried its first crew of people to the International Space Station, proving it could be trusted with human lives, not just cargo.
Then came a strange turn. SpaceX bought xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company, which made the Grok chatbot and included the social platform X. The AI side brought in $3.2 billion in 2025 but lost $6.4 billion, pulling the whole group into the red. Critics called folding a money-losing AI business into the rocket company one of the most questionable moves before the big stock listing.
SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX in June 2026, raising as much as $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. The value started around $1.75 trillion and climbed past $2 trillion, putting it among the most valuable companies on Earth. The star of the show was Starlink, the satellite internet business, with over 10 million subscribers and most of the company's revenue. That was what convinced Musk to go public.
The shares jumped to $225 shortly after listing, briefly valuing SpaceX near $2.7 trillion. Then they fell by more than half, to about $105 by early August. Heavy spending on AI, insiders finally allowed to sell, and a huge number of investors betting the stock would fall all pushed it down. It bounced back some by September but stayed far below its peak.
By the third quarter of 2026 the AI unit's revenue had exploded, growing more than eight times over the year before and becoming more than half of all revenue, up from a small slice. Analysts said that was the moment the rocket company became an AI company, renting out computing power like a cloud provider. But it spent $16.4 billion on equipment in a single quarter, and the stock traded at roughly 63 times sales.
Its biggest ambitions sit in Starship, a giant reusable rocket it is developing to carry much heavier loads and eventually people to the Moon and Mars. NASA has picked Starship for lunar landings. The risks are real: rockets are expensive and explode sometimes, regulators scrutinize launches and satellite networks, and Starlink faces competition from other satellite internet providers and from fiber and mobile networks.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026