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SpaceX IPO Deets
00:19:50
SpaceX filed publicly for its IPO on Nasdaq, revealing $18.7B in 2025 revenue, billions in losses, and Musk's 85.1% voting control. Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25B per month for compute. Nvidia beat estimates again, Spotify launches Reserved ticketing, and Waymo suspends service over flooding.
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Thursday, May 21, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today SpaceX filed for its IPO, revealing $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue, billions in losses, and Elon Musk's 85.1% voting control. Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for compute Nvidia beat estimates again and Spotify launched reserved ticketing. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech foreign Today's episode is brought to you by Doppl. Disguises are getting pretty good these days, and I'm not just talking about when you throw on a pair of glasses and a hoodie and hope you won't be recognized. We're talking about the kind of disguises that end up in your inbox, on your phone, or on the web, blending in as your everyday internal email, casual text message or normal website. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. Their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. From deepfakes to bad links to impersonation attempts, Doppel helps you stay ahead of these threats with their AI native social engineering defense platform. Learn more at doppel.com that's.p P E L.com SpaceX has filed publicly for its IPO, choosing the Nasdaq to make its debut under the symbol SPCX. Elon Musk's shares give him 85.1% of the voting power in the company. Other interesting tidbits SpaceX reported 2025 revenue, up 33% year on year to 18.7 billion, though it was not profitable. Starlink subscribers grew 105% year on year to 10.3 million in Q1 2026, and SpaceX is setting aside $530 million for potential litigation losses, including lawsuits involving Grok's spicy mode, which it described as a heightened risk. Quoting Bloomberg, SpaceX filed publicly for what stands to be the largest ever initial public offering, revealing billions in losses and a super voting share plan allowing Elon Musk to keep control of the company. The rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence giant is giving the billionaire the power to outvote anyone else and promising him outsized rewards, including as many as 1 billion more shares if he can pull it off, according to a filing Wednesday with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission. The goals Musk, 54, would need to hit include a human sett on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants, the filing shows. Before that can happen, SpaceX is tasked with making the dream of data centers in space a reality, part of what it says will be the largest total addressable market in history at $28.5 trillion. The question for investors is whether the sum of Musk's aspirations for SpaceX are worth valuing at as much as $2 trillion viewed in light of financial disclosures that seem minuscule by comparison. For example, SpaceX had a net loss of $4.28 billion on revenue of $4.69 billion for the first quarter, compared with a net loss of $528 million on revenue of about $4 billion a year earlier, the filing shows. The listing, which is targeted to raise as much as $75 billion, shows a company that's growing quickly and burning through cash. For investors to buy into Musk's dream, they'll have to believe that SpaceX can capture a meaningful share of its perceived market opportunity and accept that they won't be if it goes wrong. SpaceX's filing depicts a conglomerate with a maturity practically unheard of in a pre IPO company. Overall, SpaceX had $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up from $14 billion the previous year. During that period, the company swung from a profit of $791 million in 2024 to a loss of $4.94 billion last year, according to the filing. So far, it derives the majority of its revenue from its Starlink satellite Internet business, which accounted for about two thirds of sales in subscribers to SpaceX's Starlink Internet service have roughly doubled over the past couple of years. Income from Those operations reached 4.42 billion last year, compared with 2 billion a year earlier. Though SpaceX dominates the space transportation industry and is a key rocket launch provider for both NASA and the Pentagon, that business still loses money on an operational basis, the filing shows. For the three months ended March 31, the Space segment generated revenue of 619 million and a loss from operations of 662 million, the filing should A year ago, the company's space segment generated revenue of $4 billion and a loss from operations of 657 million. The company's ambitions for lofting data centers into orbit remain huge. It plans to launch 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity on solar powered satellites each year, equivalent to roughly one fifth of total annual US power production in 2025, the filing shows. By far the most cash hungry segment of the company is AI. Out of SpaceX's massive capital requirements, which almost doubled to $20.74 billion last year, more than half was allocated to spending tied to the AI business, a recent addition to the company. After SpaceX acquired Xai this year, losses from SpaceX's AI operations increased to 6.36 billion last year, compared with $1.56 billion in 2024, the filing shows. The company is also looking to bulk up in AI, in part through acquisitions such as its $60 billion deal for AI startup Cursor. SpaceX has the right to acquire Cursor during a 30 day window be after the company goes public, confirming an earlier Bloomberg news report. End Quote One more interesting nugget that relates directly to another massive private company, Anthropic is apparently paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May of 2029 under their compute deal, quoting the Verge. That's $15 billion annually, which could nearly double the $18.7 billion in revenue that SpaceX reported in all of 2025. The agreement includes a clause in which either company can terminate the deal within 90 days of notice and Anthropic's fees will be reduced during the capacity ramp up this month and next. The exit clause was likely necessary based on the fast moving nature of the AI industry. In some sense, Anthropic's Claude competes with X's Grok, and it's a sign of how desperate AI companies like Anthropic are for compute capacity, especially as the data center build out across the country runs into serious local opposition. In a post on X, Elon Musk said that SpaceX stands ready to offer similar deals to other AI companies that want to access the data centers. SpaceX is quote offering AI compute as a service at significant scale, he said. End quote. Spotify announced a whole bunch of stuff today at an event that I was unaware was happening. For example, this is quoting the Hollywood Reporter Spotify is hoping it can lend a hand in getting concert tickets to an artist's biggest fans, as the streaming service revealed reserved on Thursday during its investor day, a new feature that, as it sounds, sets aside tickets for premium subscribers so they have a better shot at buying them. Spotify said that starting in the US this summer, select artists will be able to use Reserve to set aside tickets for fans on the platform. The platform has partnered with Live Nation on the program as part of a multi year agreement. The platform will use streams, shares and other types of activity to identify an artist's most dedicated fans and hold two tour tickets for them. Fans selected through reserved will get up to two tickets and they'll have a day long window to make a ticket purchase if selected. Spotify didn't give any details on what artists will work with the streaming service for the new feature or how many tickets artists would set aside with reserved, though the service acknowledged there will be significant more super fans than there are seats available on a tour, so not every fan will receive an offer. How much Spotify's new feature will get tickets in the hands of fans remains to be seen, though it'll likely at least be met with excitement from fans who, as Spotify said, have grown increasingly frustrated with the ticket buying process as they spend hours in online queues for the most in demand acts as they attempt to snag seats for a show. Spotify and UMG also announced plans to let premium users create AI covers and remixes using music from participating UMG artists as a paid add on without giving a launch date. Spotify also said it has more than 1 million subscriptions to AudioBook plus, which is on track for $100 million in ARR and unveiled an 11 Labs powered audiobook self publishing tool. And then there's this quoting TechCrunch today the company released the ability for users to explore a topic by creating a podcast about it. Spotify is also adding personal context to this podcast generation tool. For instance, the tool can a daily briefing or a podcast based on your email and schedule. Users can also make a multi step request like Create a daily audio brief for my road trip through Italy, walk me through my day using my calendar and bookings, recommend a memorable dinner spot near where I'll be, and end with a podcast recommendation. I'd love for the drive to generate a podcast. The tool will compete with Google's Notebook lm which started popularizing podcast generation based on selected source material a few years ago. And in true Google fashion, the company also released another separate feature to create a daily podcast based on the Discover Feed. Since then, the format of creating a podcast to explore a topic or get daily briefings has been adopted by companies like Adobe and 11 Labs and apps like Hero and Hux. Spotify's recent launch of a desktop app follows the company's recent debut of a command line tool for users of coding tools like Claude Code or Codecs to create personal podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the new Studio app and personal podcast feature, non coders can now also take advantage of this offering. Well, again, if you want to put me out of a job, you have many ways to do so now, though you know you won't have my curatorial judgment, my analysis, or my wonderful dad jokes. 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Viori's his everyday staples are ready for wherever the day takes him. With fitness, go to's Performance Essentials and Travel ready layers, you can gear him up for his next adventure in one place. Get 20% off your first order at viori.com techbrew that's viori.com Techbrew exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. These days this is kind of a ho hum headline because it's completely expected, though the numbers are still nutso. Butso Nvidia reported Q1 revenue up 85% year on year to $81.62 billion. Data center revenue was up 92% year on year to $75.2 billion and they announced an $80 billion share repurchase program Nvidia is making per quarter in net income. Really internalize this number now $58.3 billion per quarter again, I'm not going to dive into all the numbers now. I am going to give you though, the color on the business overall from Jensen. Quoting cnbc, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has largely conceded China's artificial intelligence chip market to Huawei, as US Export restrictions continue to reshape the global AI semiconductor landscape. The demand in China is quite large, Wang told CNBC's Sarah Eisen. Huawei is very, very strong. They had a record year. They'll likely, very likely have an extraordinary year coming up and their local ecosystem of chip companies are doing quite well. Because we've evacuated that market, we've really largely conceded that market to them, he added. The remarks underscore how Washington's tightening restrictions on advanced AI chip exports have accelerated Beijing's push towards semiconductor self sufficiency. Still, he suggested, Nvidia remains eager to return should conditions improve. We would be more than delighted to serve the market, huang said. We have a lot of customers there, we have a lot of partners there, and we've been there for 30 years. Nvidia is also expanding its supply chain aggressively as it prepares for what Huang described as a massive growing opportunity tied to the broader AI economy. The idea of a many times larger company is not out of the question, huang said, adding that Nvidia was investing heavily across what he called the AI industry's five layer cake, spanning energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications. Huang said Nvidia's first priority for its growing cash pile was supporting suppliers amid surging demand. As we're growing hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, we have to our supply chain so that they are able to support our growth, he said, end quote. And quoting the journal, demand has gone parabolic, chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a conference call with analysts. The reason is simple. The era of agentic AI is here. So far this year, Nvidia's stock is up nearly 20%, making it the largest publicly listed company in the world with a market value of nearly 5.5 trillion. As the company has grown rapidly during the AI boom, investors have increasingly required it to beat expectations by wider and wider margins in order to move Nvidia's share price significantly higher. Right now, it's not whether the company will beat estimates. That's kind of taken for granted, said Will Rind, founder and CEO of Granite Shares, an investment firm with $14 billion in assets that runs a leveraged fund that owns nearly $5 billion in Nvidia shares. Going forward, the focus will likely be on the rollout of Nvidia's newest generation of computing systems, known as Vera Rubin, which is expected to begin shipping later this year, investors and analysts say. On an earnings call with analysts Wednesday, Huang said that despite despite rising competition, he expects Vera Rubin to be even more successful than Nvidia's previous generation, known as Grace Blackwell, which Huang described as ubiquitous. Huang on Wednesday also repeatedly emphasized Nvidia's efforts to attract new partners like Anthropic. The two companies last year struck a major deal and diversify its customer base to include more and smaller enterprise AI users. Wang added that he expects the business segment that includes enterprise customers and smaller data center companies known as Neo clouds, to grow faster than the segment that includes larger hyperscalers as customers. End quote. Finally today, Waymo is suspending operations in Atlanta and San Antonio, Texas, as its robo taxis struggle with flooded roads. Waymo says it has yet to develop a final remedy for flooding situations, quoting TechCrunch. One of Waymo's robo taxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution. Safety is Waymo's top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped, the company said in a statement. Waymo admitted that it hadn't finished developing a final remedy for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded higher speed roadway, according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo Robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding something was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning watch or advisory. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
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