Elon Musk said SpaceX expects to reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, a figure he said could arrive as early as 2029, on the company’s first-ever earnings call. The forecast came alongside results showing $7.8 billion in revenue, up 92% from a year earlier, and $18.4 billion in capital expenditures.
For readers searching Verizon Down, the timing is part of the story: the call put a rare set of numbers around SpaceX’s business and its most important satellite service, Starlink, at the same moment the company was trying to explain how quickly it can scale. Musk said Starlink could provide the majority of the world’s internet in less than 10 years, but only in countries where the company is allowed to operate. Starlink already has 12 million subscribers and is available in more than 155 countries and markets.
The spending helps explain the ambition. SpaceX’s $18.4 billion in capital expenditures were 557% higher than the $2.8 billion base implied by the prior year’s figure, a sign that the company is pouring cash into infrastructure, satellites and computing capacity rather than treating growth as a paper exercise. Musk also said Anthropic sends SpaceX a monthly check for $1.25 billion for AI computing power, underscoring how much demand the company is trying to absorb while it expands.
Still, the forecast sits far above Wall Street’s own math. Goldman Sachs sees SpaceX revenue at $470 billion in 2030, while Morgan Stanley projects $330 billion. Musk’s number is not just larger; it would require a business that is still at $7.8 billion in annual revenue to expand by more than 125 times in five years, while keeping the spending machine running at a pace few private companies have ever attempted.
That gap matters because Musk is not a neutral forecaster. A New York Times analysis of 600 predictions found that only about 19% came to fruition, a record that makes his confidence part of the story, not just the backdrop. No company has ever recorded $1 trillion in annual revenue in a year, and SpaceX’s first earnings call left open the central question behind the headline number: whether the company can turn Starlink’s reach, its computing demand and its launch business into a revenue base large enough to make the target more than a number on a slide.
