Reading the SpaceX IPO document filed yesterday with the SEC reveals one of the blind spots of the empire built by Elon Musk: behind the rockets, Starlink has become the real economic engine of the group, and undoubtedly the most strategic asset of its entire industrial architecture. The satellite network no longer only finances SpaceX’s space ambitions, and now fuels the group’s development in artificial intelligence, giant data centers and, tomorrow, orbital computing.
In 2025, the Connectivity segment, mainly driven by Starlink, generated $11.387 billion in revenue, compared to $4.086 billion for SpaceX’s historic space activity. Above all, Starlink posts $4.423 billion in operating income and $7.168 billion in Adjusted EBITDA. In other words, rockets no longer constitute the group’s economic center of gravity. They have become the industrial infrastructure that fuels a global telecom activity now transformed into a veritable cash machine for the Musk empire.
For two decades, SpaceX was seen as a space engineering company dependent on government contracts and particularly heavy investment cycles. Starlink shatters this reading by imposing a model much closer to telecoms and cloud infrastructures: recurring revenues, monthly subscriptions, international growth and strong absorption of fixed costs as the network gains scale.
The network now claims approximately 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, territories and markets. The constellation represents nearly 75% of the active maneuverable satellites currently in orbit. Few companies have built global physical infrastructure at this speed.
The IPO document filed by SpaceX with the SEC above all shows that Starlink is no longer an ancillary product of SpaceX, but today constitutes the financing mechanism for the rest of the Musk empire. While the group’s AI activity is still accumulating massive losses, with $6.355 billion in operational losses in 2025, the flows generated by Connectivity make it possible to support the accelerated development of computing infrastructures.
To ensure its growth, SpaceX plans to use revenues from its mature activities to finance the development of data centers, computing and, ultimately, orbital computing.
This development explains the strategic repositioning of the group. The IPO no longer presents SpaceX as a simple space player, but as a company gradually controlling several critical layers of the digital economy: orbital launch, global connectivity, data centers, energy power, AI models and tomorrow chip manufacturing via the Terafab project with Tesla and Intel.
Starlink’s role is central in the virtuous loop of SpaceX’s economy. Thus each Falcon or Starship launch increases the capacity of the network, each capacity improvement increases the number of subscribers, each new subscriber generates recurring revenues which finance the expansion of computing. SpaceX describes this model as a self-reinforcing cycle combining launcher reuse, orbital cost reduction and digital infrastructure growth.
The next step is the deployment of V3 satellites as early as the second half of 2026. Each satellite is expected to offer up to a terabit of downlink capacity, with Starship launches capable of massively multiplying the bandwidth available per mission. Ultimately, Starlink must no longer just provide the Internet, it must become the network layer of a global infrastructure combining AI, satellite mobility and distributed computing.
The most striking thing about the S-1 document is that SpaceX’s most profitable business is no longer related to space exploration. It looks more and more like a global telecom operator built from space, and this is probably what makes SpaceX today much more dangerous for the historical players in telecoms, cloud and digital infrastructure than for Airbus Defense & Space, or Boeing.
