Famously secret about its finances, SpaceX opens its books for the first time

The document includes some interesting details about the company’s leadership. After the IPO concludes and SpaceX becomes a public company, Musk will retain 85.1 percent of the “combined voting power” in leading SpaceX. He will serve as the company’s chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors. It will be very difficult to remove him from this position. Musk’s salary in 2025 was $54,080, a value tied to California’s minimum salary for exempt employees. Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of the company, received a salary of $1.08 million in 2025, but including stock awards, her total compensation was valued at $85.8 million. The S-1 filing notes that Musk has served as an advisor to President Trump and alludes to the possibility that changes in politics might materially affect the company’s future. “The current political environment in the United States is highly polarized, and shifts in the composition of the US Congress or changes in the presidential administration can result in significant changes in government spending priorities, regulatory posture, and the allocation of contracts and resources across industries and programs,” the filing states. “Our relationships with US government agencies and the favorability of the regulatory and procurement environment in which we operate may be affected by which political party controls the presidency or one or both chambers of the US Congress.” The filing also acknowledges the significant work that SpaceX has yet to complete with Starship to make it a fully reusable rocket capable of delivering large payloads to the Moon and Mars. “These systems involve significant technological, engineering, and operational challenges, including the need to develop habitable transportation and surface environments, and perform complex in-orbit operations,” the document states. “Solving these challenges will require developing solutions that are novel or untested and will require substantial capital investment.” By staking its future on AI, SpaceX makes the case that it is the best-placed company to build a massive constellation of orbital data centers. “We believe we are the only company with a commercially viable path to building orbital AI compute at scale,” the filing states. “This is underpinned by our unique ability to launch substantial mass into orbit cost efficiently through reusable rockets and manufacture secure, reliable, and high performance satellites at low cost and high volume. Our goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year.” SpaceX said it expects to begin deploying its orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028. This company, founded with an initial goal of launching a small rocket known as the Falcon 1, has come a long way since its humble beginnings. It has become the world’s most accomplished launch company and annually puts about 80 percent of all mass into orbit. It operates more satellites than the rest of the world combined. And yet, to reach its stratospheric valuation and addressable market, SpaceX must evolve from a space company into an AI company and continue growing rapidly. These are huge bets. It will be up to investors to decide in the coming months and years whether these are also good bets.