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.
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.
The rocket company says it’s ‘highly dependent’ on Musk’s leadership. And that his other companies are possible competitors.
President and COO Gwynne Shotwell took to X to comment on yesterday’s vague commitment by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to plug the long-standing gaps in rural US coverage, as frustrated residents adopt solutions from Starlink, Amazon, and AST SpaceMobile:
Weeeelllll, I guess @Starlink Mobile is doing something right! It’s David and Goliath (X3) all over again — I’m bettin’ on David :)
Although Shotwell’s SpaceX is hardly the underdog with over 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, and the only company with a fleet of proven relaunch vehicles.
Last year, EchoStar agreed to offload 65Mhz of its spectrum to SpaceX for its direct-to-cell service, while AT&T snapped up 50Mhz of its spectrum to build out its 5G network. Now it’s official, with the FCC noting that SpaceX will be able to use its spectrum for “terrestrial, space-based, and hybrid network architectures.”
[The Wall Street Journal]
Following its acquisition by Elon’s other company, xAI is now being referred to as SpaceXAI. Presumably this is only the start of the brand synergy to come.
tuff_ghost:
Excited for X to become SpaceX X by XAi
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In Wednesday’s annoucement of its compute partnership with Anthropic, the company formerly known as xAI referred to itself as “SpaceXAI.” It was the first time I had seen that name, and while I don’t think it’s a good one, it made some sense following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.
According to Elon Musk, “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX.”
That’s listed among SpaceX’s “substantial capital expenditures” in the S-1 registration filed ahead of its IPO, reports Reuters.
The space / AI / social network company is working with Intel to build its “Terafab” chip plant that Musk said could rely on a new 14A chip manufacturing process.
It’s either a gilded pathway to the stars or a financial black hole.
Reporting from Bloomberg on how many Cybertrucks Elon’s other companies have been buying:
SpaceX, the Musk-led rocket and satellite maker, accounted for 1,279 — or more than 18% — of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the US during the fourth quarter, according to registration data that S&P Global Mobility provided to Bloomberg News. The billionaire’s other ventures acquired another 60 vehicles during those months.
The billionaire space race sure heated up yesterday with Amazon’s purchase of Globalstar. In response, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched 54 new Starlink satellites in less than 24 hours via two deployments, while Jeff Bezos has only managed to launch a total of 241 Leo satellites in the last 12 months.
Elon Musk has apparently made the jump from X to infect both TikTok and Instagram with new verified accounts. According to the New York Times:
Mr. Musk needs to build widespread public interest in SpaceX so it can raise billions of dollars from investors. The public offering could turn the 54-year-old tech mogul, who is already the world’s richest man, into the first trillionaire.
[nytimes.com]
The New York Times reports that Elon Musk is demanding that “banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers” working on the SpaceX IPO buy subscriptions to Grok, which is technically now under the SpaceX umbrella.
[The New York Times]
That’s according to Reuters sources, but I wonder what it might reveal about Elon Musk’s combination of companies now that papers for a public offering have apparently been filed.
Now we know why Delta Airlines has been holding fast to its sluggish in-flight connectivity providers while seemingly everyone else has jumped into Elon Musk’s lap: it was holding out for Amazon Leo. Amazon’s still busy building out its satellite constellation so we’re talking 2028 before Delta can start offering the service on about 500 domestic aircraft.
