Elon Musk spoke at a JPMorgan investor event on Thursday to promote SpaceX before its highly anticipated IPO. He left the detailed numbers to the bankers and instead shared his vision of a company that could change global computing, transportation, and even human civilization.
Morgan Stanley estimates that SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4 trillion by 2040, according to numbers shared with investors. Both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley expect about $160 billion in revenue by 2028. NYU professor Aswath Damodaran predicts $420 billion in revenue by 2036. SpaceX could bring in over $40 billion in sales in 2026. With such a wide range of estimates, Musk’s skill in telling a clear growth story is especially important.
The main reason for optimism is bandwidth. Musk said SpaceX plans to launch about 100,000 satellites, with new Starlink models offering over 100 times the bandwidth of current ones. Starlink already has more than 10 million subscribers in 164 countries and has been cash-flow positive for over ten years. More bandwidth is key to the future of autonomous vehicles and robotics, which Musk is developing at his other companies, including Tesla.
The next big project is building AI data centers in space. This technology does not exist yet, but Musk said it would be less complicated than the communication satellites SpaceX already makes. He also suggested that space-based data centers could become the main way to expand AI computing power as building new power plants on the ground gets harder.
Starship, SpaceX’s fully reusable heavy-lift rocket, is essential for nearly all of these plans. It lowers the cost of reaching space by about 90% compared to the Falcon 9, which already cut launch costs by around 95% compared to the Space Shuttle. Because Starship can be reused, the main cost becomes fuel instead of the rocket itself, similar to how commercial aviation works.
Musk pointed out that semiconductors are the biggest bottleneck. SpaceX and Tesla are working together to build chip production capacity at the Terafab facility in Texas to solve issues with logic, memory, and packaging. During his talk, Musk joked about a Tesla AI satellite, which made the audience laugh and sparked more speculation among analysts and investors about a possible merger between the two companies.
