The particular joy of an S-1 is that it cracks open a business long held close.
So, when SpaceX finally and officially filed to go public last week, it was momentous. At long last, there was visibility: We know the company’s 2025 revenue was $18.67 billion, that its losses are also up to nearly $5 billion, and that Elon Musk’s pay package is partially linked to establishing a minimum-one-million-citizen colony on Mars.
But, as a recent note from PitchBook’s Franco Granda pointed out, there’s also a lot we didn’t see, and that even in this wave of disclosures, crucial pieces of information didn’t come to light. Granda wrote that SpaceX’s S-1 isn’t nearly as granular as you might expect when it comes to, say, information around subscriptions, which appear in the business not only in the context of X (formerly Twitter) but Starlink.
This is especially material, as Starlink is clearly the economic engine of the business in so many ways and has stunning margins (an adjusted EBITDA margin of 63%).
“Most major subscription businesses that have gone public (T-Mobile, AT&T, Spotify, Duolingo, Peloton, Chewy) disclose retention or churn metrics, whereas SpaceX does not,” Granda writes. “With 10.3 million [Starlink] subscribers… and aggressive international expansion into lower-priced tiers, investors cannot decompose whether headline subscriber growth reflects durable cohort retention or is masking attrition behind elevated gross adds… This is among the most important metrics for modeling subscriber economics, and its absence is conspicuous.”
Granda also notes that there’s no delineation of the cost of each Falcon 9 launch and that, while clearly the reusability of SpaceX’s rockets has provided tailwinds, “the core unit economics of the most prolific launch vehicle in history remain hidden.”
And we didn’t learn as much about AI unit economics as we may have expected, given the intensity of SpaceX’s AI pitch. “AI segment revenue (excluding advertising) contributes just 6.7% of company revenue, with the balance flowing through legacy X social platform advertising,” Granda notes. “There is no way to isolate Grok subscription revenue, X subscription revenue, xAI API revenue, or growth trajectories for them.”
Similarly, though we know SpaceX has deployed $20 billion into AI infrastructure, the filing makes clear that number doesn’t reflect utilization. Hence, there’s no way to know if that $20 billion has led to enough capacity for the foreseeable future (not just for SpaceX, but for its multi-billion deal with Anthropic).
So, while we know a whole lot more than we did before, some things never change. Parts of SpaceX, as the company looks to raise as much as a mammoth $80 billion in its IPO, remain close to the chest.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com