The nice thing about forecasting your own company’s revenue is that you get to revise the forecast, and if the revision is in the right direction nobody deducts points. In August, Elon Musk was saying that SpaceX was internally projecting $1 trillion of revenue in 2030, with a “non-zero” chance of getting there in 2029. That was two months ago. On Tuesday night, on the company’s third-quarter earnings webcast, the range became $500 billion to $1 trillion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027. And then a few hours later, on X, it became this: “As crazy as this sounds, $1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible.”
Note the mechanism of the hedge, because it is doing a lot of work. Musk doesn’t say it will happen, or even that it’s likely. He says it is “no longer impossible,” which is a claim that is almost definitionally unfalsifiable. Tomorrow’s weather in San Francisco in 2031 is no longer impossible to predict, either, in the sense that anything might happen. What changed between August and October to move the target in by two years is, as Business Insider’s Theron Mohamed reported, a genuinely monster quarter: after the bell on Tuesday, SpaceX posted close to $15 billion of revenue for the quarter, up 161% from the same period of 2025.
The driver was what SpaceX calls its super-intelligence division — this is the part of the company that contains X and the AI chatbot Grok, since these are now all one company — where revenue surged 830%, from around $800 million to $7.6 billion. SpaceX attributed that to new cloud services agreements, around $600 million of revenue from its recent acquisition of Cursor, and increased enterprise adoption of Grok. So the story of the quarter is that the rockets-and-satellites company is rapidly becoming an AI company that also has rockets and satellites. The Falcon rockets and Starlink still matter — and as we’ve written before, Starlink is the part that actually turns an operating profit — but the growth story Musk is selling is compute.
Now the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the fun part. SpaceX earned just under $19 billion in 2025 — it disclosed its historical financials before going public this summer. A trillion dollars in 2028 would be a 53-fold increase in three years. For context, Amazon and Walmart, the two highest-revenue companies on Earth, each did a little over $700 billion in net sales last financial year. Musk is floating the idea that his company will out-earn both of them by more than 40%, in about two years.
Wall Street, for what it’s worth, has its own numbers and they are not these numbers. JPMorgan, in a post-earnings note, forecast $254 billion of SpaceX revenue in 2027 — itself an enormous figure, roughly a quarter of the way to trillionaire territory, and arrived at by people whose job is to be roughly right rather than entertaining. Imagine being the analyst who has to model a CEO who moves his own goalposts by 25% annually and in the direction he prefers. You just can’t.
The skeptics were not hard to find. Neil Wilson, UK investor strategist at Saxo Bank, told Business Insider by email that $1 trillion by 2028 was “pushing it,” and that the figure “would imply such an enormous pull-forward in demand as to defy credibility.” He did concede he’d “never say never” about SpaceX getting there eventually, “but by 2028 I’d say the chance is zero, whatever Elon says!” You will notice that “zero” and “no longer impossible” are in tension. One of these people runs the company; the other one is right more often than not, historically, when the subject is Musk’s timelines.
One genuinely open question is what “SpaceX” even means in this forecast. Musk revealed on Tuesday that Tesla and SpaceX have formed committees to explore a potential merger — a deal whose contours we looked at earlier this week — and Tesla did about $95 billion of revenue last year. Business Insider notes it’s unclear whether that $95 billion is inside the trillion or outside it. This matters! If you get to consolidate a car company, the mountain gets a bit shorter. And Musk has a record of thinking very big indeed about what this company could be worth; he was recently sketching a path to a $12 quadrillion SpaceX, which makes $1 trillion of revenue look almost modest. Almost.
The boring, plausible version of the future is that SpaceX keeps growing very fast and gets to some number between JPMorgan’s and Musk’s, later than Musk says. But boring and plausible is not the product here. The product is the number, announced at 9 p.m. on social media, and the number keeps going up.