Helmed by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, SpaceX has made a name for itself as a leading rocket launch provider. We bring you complete coverage of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launches and landings, as well as SpaceX’s more ambitious exploration goals. That includes flying people around the Moon in the company’s Dragon capsule and starting a human colony on Mars.
The Pentagon may make a deal where it would pay for billions of dollars of compute from SpaceX, according to The Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX already provides compute to Google and Anthropic, and the company wants to do more in cloud computing, the WSJ says.
[The Wall Street Journal]
SPCX sunk another three percent in extended trading after last night’s aborted Starship launch, falling further beneath its IPO price of $135. The record-setting IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first (paper) trillionaire. Today he’s worth $838.1 billion. Concerning.
The thirteenth, and first post-IPO, flight test of SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle was supposed to occur Thursday night, but when the countdown hit zero just before 7PM ET, “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” writes Elon Musk.
No, not the 2,500 baby jellyfish NASA launched in 1991 to tell us how the human body reacts to spaceflight, but the rocket-launch phenomenon caused by sunlight reflecting off high-altitude rocket gases at twilight, while the observer watches in darkness.
The new Fi Ultra adds satellite connectivity to track your dog anywhere in the US, even in cellular dead zones.
The company formerly known as xAI has referred to itself as SpaceXAI before following the acquisition by SpaceX. There’s a new logo, too.
SpaceX bonds are creating losses for the fast-money types who piled in at the offering. “Bond types either aren’t sure that SpaceX will hang on to its investment-grade credit ratings, or will only get involved if they get paid a fat risk premium for doing so,” the Financial Times explains. SpaceX stock is, as of this writing, trading below its IPO price. Gee, if only someone had pointed out that this company is a stinker.
[Financial Times]
President and COO Gwynne Shotwell has apparently told investors that SpaceX plans to launch a new terrestrial Starlink service that would sell mobile contracts directly to individuals in the US — a threat that could extract better revenue-sharing deals from its current telecom partners. Analysts think a T-Mobile acquisition makes sense to accelerate the move and solve SpaceX’s spectrum deficit issue.
Musk’s total net worth is now $957 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That figure is still $660 billion higher than Larry Page, the next person on the list, whose net worth is $297 billion.
[Bloomberg]
The open-source AI startup has a deal through 2029, similar to Anthropic and Google, to rent compute capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center for $150 million per month (up to $6.3 billion), reports the Wall Street Journal.
[Wall Street Journal]
While SpaceX plans satellite-based AI servers, Bloomberg reports it ran into trouble trying to develop and run Grok AI in Memphis, citing unnamed sources. They claim that deals renting capacity to Anthropic ($15 billion annually) and Google ($920 million per month) happened following hardware variation and lag issues:
Elon Musk’s company had planned to train its most cutting-edge AI models on a massive amount of computing power by using a cluster of three data center campuses. However, the firm encountered latency issues when connecting Colossus 1 with two other sites located more than 10 miles away, the people said, compounded by aging network infrastructure.
As reported by CNBC, the New York Times, and others, trading commenced at a price 11 percent above the $135 IPO price, but lower than the $175 shown in some earlier indications. It’s already spiked as high as $167, before falling back to $155. As long as the share price remains above $138, that is enough to make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
It also gives SpaceX a market cap of over $2 trillion, making it currently the 6th most valuable public company in the US.
That price puts SpaceX at a market valuation of around $1.77 trillion ahead of its record-breaking stock market debut on Friday. CNBC reports that SpaceX may allocate 20 percent of shares to retail investors, down from the previous expectation of 30 percent.
No telling if that Starlink Mini dish on the right includes an integrated battery, per rumors, but both terminals look thinner than current models. Elon Musk revealed them yesterday without any specs, pricing, or dates.
Instead of paying hundreds up front, new customers in “select markets” will have to rent their Starlink hardware for $10 per month on top of the monthly fee. It only applies to Residential plans currently, and renters can’t pause the service, but can buy their kit later by ”creating a support ticket,“ according to a support page. The move comes after Starlink recently raised prices on its monthly plans.
After Jeff Bezos’s New Glenn rocket failed to put BlueBird 7 into orbit, AST SpaceMobile will use Elon Musk’s trusty Falcon 9 to help build out AST’s space-based cellular broadband network useable by everyday smartphones. The delivery of those giant BlueBird 8, 9, and 10 satellites — which feature the largest commercial communications arrays ever deployed in low Earth orbit — is currently scheduled for Wednesday, June 17th.
“What we’re showing here is kind of a draft version of the version one of the SpaceX AI satellite,” said Elon Musk at the reveal on Monday. “It’s actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite.” The release of renders and specs for the space-based AI1 data center is very much timed to lend credence to the SpaceX IPO, which is set to begin trading on Friday.
Per a regulatory filing, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029, as reported by TechCrunch.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Google says that it’s a “short-term” agreement to help meet “surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected.”
Anthropic’s deal with SpaceX was announced in May.
The S&P just found the backbone that Nasdaq discarded on the street alongside the rest of New York City’s trash. While others are bending the rules to accommodate SpaceX and other gargantuan IPOs, the S&P is standing firm. “No changes will be made” to accommodate these mega offerings.
[S&P Dow Jones]
Elon destroyed Twitter, but somehow still won as he prepares to take SpaceX public in what could be the biggest IPO ever.
Grimes County, Texas, awarded the company a property tax exemption for its planned $55 billion Terafab semiconductor plant. Local residents seem to feel the same way about the project as many do about data centers, and this tax break won’t help. As local landowner Rhonda Nesloney put it in court:
“Elon was on the news bragging he’s about to be a trillionaire . . . and you want to consider giving him a tax abatement.”
CNBC reports details from a new filing ahead of SpaceX’s IPO on June 12th and notes a mention that xAI, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year, bought $269 million worth of Tesla megapack batteries in April.
At the $135 per share price tag, SpaceX would be valued at $1.77 trillion, which assumes the EchoStar spectrum and Cursor transactions close. The valuation would make SpaceX the seventh-biggest company in the U.S. by market cap, and put it above Tesla, which is valued at about $1.6 trillion.
The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.
After a scrubbed launch on Thursday, SpaceX’s first V3 Starship left Pad 2 at Starbase on Friday evening.
SpaceX is now preparing to go public, and a lot of its big promises hinge on the development of vehicles like the next-generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicle launched today. The booster will not attempt a return this time, while the Flight 12 Starship is attempting to deploy 20 Starlink simulators and two “modified” Starlink satellites.
After being pushed back an hour, we were a few minutes away from the scheduled 7:30PM ET opening of a 90-minute window for the 12th Starship flight test, before it was scrubbed about ten minutes later, saying they will try again tomorrow.
This is the first test flight since SpaceX and its most significant risk factor filed for a massive IPO yesterday, the first attempt for new “next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles,” and the first launch scheduled from a new Pad 2 at the Starbase in Boca Chica, TX.
