Why does SpaceX, with an annual loss of 5 billion dollars and a valuation of 2 trillion dollars, captivate crypto players so much?

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

According to public reports, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 is $18.5 billion, with a net loss of nearly $5 billion.

In the same year, the company submitted an IPO application to the SEC, with its target valuation adjusted from $12.5 trillion to $20 trillion within months, aiming for the largest IPO in history.

At the same time, its balance sheet holds 8,285 bitcoins, valued at approximately $600 million, making it the fourth largest corporate holder of bitcoin globally.

As one of the hottest tech companies today, every move of SpaceX has attracted the attention of the cryptocurrency community.

I. "The Loss-Making Giant"

First, let's take a look at SpaceX's business and revenue structure.

SpaceX's revenue sources today are divided into three parts: satellite internet business Starlink, commercial rocket launches, and xAI, which was integrated this year.

According to undisclosed financial data obtained by The Information, SpaceX's total revenue in 2025 is approximately $18.7 billion, with Starlink contributing $11.4 billion, rocket launch services about $4.1 billion, and xAI about $3.2 billion.

It is clear that Starlink is the pillar that truly supports the entire company.

In 2025, Starlink's adjusted EBITDA profit margin reached 63%, making it the only segment among the three that is genuinely profitable. Its business logic is not complicated: use reusable rockets to launch satellites in batches and charge global users for broadband subscription fees. The marginal cost of adding a new user is nearly zero, and as the scale continues to expand, there is further room for profit margin improvement.

In addition to basic broadband services, Starlink's potential is far beyond that. In 2025, SpaceX spent $17 billion to acquire EchoStar's spectrum licenses, which serve as the entry ticket for mobile direct-to-satellite services. Once this technology is scaled, Starlink's potential user base will expand from the current millions of subscribers to over 6 billion mobile users worldwide. This is also seen as one of the important supports for Starlink's valuation.

The rocket launch business is another moat. SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the most frequently used commercial launch vehicle globally, and its reusable technology allows its launch costs to be far lower than competitors. In 2025, SpaceX completed over 160 launches, with NASA, the U.S. military, and numerous commercial satellite customers heavily relying on this launch channel, which is nearly irreplaceable in the short term.

The source of the losses points to a specific decision: the acquisition of xAI.

xAI is an AI company founded by Musk in 2023, focusing on the large language model Grok. In February 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition of xAI, but xAI's financial situation is quite poor, burning about $1 billion per month, with annual cash consumption reaching approximately $14 billion. Meanwhile, xAI has experienced severe talent loss, with several core co-founders leaving, leading to ongoing team instability.

SpaceX's profit of about $8 billion in 2024 drastically reversed to a loss of nearly $5 billion in 2025, largely as a direct result of digesting this acquisition.

Currently, SpaceX's target valuation is $20 trillion, and if it successfully goes public, its market value will exceed all companies in the S&P 500 index except for Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. The corresponding price-to-sales ratio is between 80 and 95 times, while even Nvidia at the peak of the AI boom was only around 40 to 45 times; such pricing for SpaceX has almost no historical precedent.

The market is willing to give this number, betting on several narratives that span a decade or even longer, simply put:

• The commercialization of Starship will significantly lower global launch costs;
• Deploying AI data centers in orbit;
• And further down the line, lunar bases and deep space exploration.

If we were to summarize SpaceX's current situation in one sentence, it would be: it is using current losses to exchange for a larger market landscape in the future, and the market is willing to price this story in advance.

However, high valuations also come with high risks. Reena Aggarwal, a finance professor at Georgetown University and an IPO expert, states that even a fundamentally strong company with significant investor interest may still face IPO failure if the market turns or experiences excessive volatility.

II. Why is the Crypto Community Focused on It?

Holding Bitcoin

When discussing the relationship between SpaceX and the cryptocurrency community, this company, like Tesla, holds bitcoin.

In terms of corporate bitcoin holdings, SpaceX is currently the fourth largest known corporate holder, following Strategy, Marathon Digital, and Riot Platforms (rankings may vary under different statistical criteria).

However, SpaceX has a different logic compared to the currently leading companies in bitcoin holdings.

Strategy is the pioneer of the corporate BTC reserve narrative, with holdings far exceeding all other companies; buying bitcoin itself is its core strategy and main business.

Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms are mining companies, and bitcoin is their mined production inventory. Currently, mining companies are selling BTC to convert mining profits into cash flow to support operations.

Tesla and SpaceX's main businesses are entirely unrelated to cryptocurrency; one manufactures electric vehicles, and the other builds rockets, yet both have included bitcoin on their balance sheets.

Currently, Tesla holds about 11,509 BTC, making it the 12th largest holder among known publicly traded companies. SpaceX, as a private company, holds 8,285 BTC, valued at approximately $600 million, also ranking high among known corporate holdings. The holdings of both companies reflect Musk and his team's recognition of bitcoin's value as an asset, willing to include it in the company's treasury allocation.

It is also worth mentioning that the financial data before SpaceX's IPO does not need to be publicly disclosed, and bitcoin holdings are naturally not within the scope of any regulatory disclosures. However, the IPO changes this premise. According to the new FASB accounting standards effective at the end of 2025, digital assets held by publicly traded companies must be measured at fair value, recorded at the market price at the end of each reporting period, with price fluctuations directly entering the profit and loss statement.

In other words, after SpaceX goes public, whenever the price of bitcoin experiences significant fluctuations, the company's reported net profit figures will also fluctuate, and thus the stock price will inevitably be affected by the volatility of the cryptocurrency market. Conversely, SpaceX's increase or decrease in bitcoin holdings can also influence BTC price fluctuations.

The Crypto Institutions Have Opened a Door

In April 2026, SpaceX submitted a confidential IPO application to the SEC, and discussions about the company quickly heated up.

According to the currently disclosed timeline, the prospectus will be publicly released at the end of May, analysts will meet with management on June 7, the global roadshow will officially start in the week of June 8, and a special investor event for about 1,500 retail investors will be held on June 11.

This IPO plan intends to allocate up to 30% of the issuance to retail investors, far exceeding the industry norm of 5% to 10%. Meanwhile, the Saudi sovereign fund PIF is reportedly negotiating a cornerstone investment of about $5 billion with SpaceX, and institutional endorsements are also following suit.

SpaceX's equity has never been something ordinary people could access. Top venture capital firms, private equity funds, and a few invited high-net-worth individuals make up SpaceX's shareholder list. For example, Kevin Warsh, a nominee for the Federal Reserve Chair, disclosed in the latest financial report that his personal assets include early investments in SpaceX.

Long-time employees who have worked alongside Musk have accumulated a large number of options, but liquidity in the private market has always been limited, making the IPO the best channel for monetizing these shares.

However, this pattern loosened in 2026, driven by players from the cryptocurrency exchanges.

Within days of SpaceX submitting its IPO application, Bitget launched the IPO Prime platform, with its first product being the preSPAX token, in collaboration with the compliant tokenization platform Republic, open for subscription to global retail investors with a minimum participation threshold of $100.

On April 10, Binance Wallet quietly launched a Pre-IPO section in the Markets segment, with the partner being the PreStocks platform on Solana, supporting trading of tokenized assets from star private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Gate has also launched a digital Pre-IPOs participation method, opening a reservation entry.

SpaceX was chosen as one of the first Pre-IPO targets to go on-chain, and the logic behind this is not complicated. It is currently the highest-valued tech company in the private market, with a target valuation of $20 trillion and an IPO fundraising scale that could exceed $75 billion; these two numbers alone are enough to generate significant market attention.

However, it is important to note that there has been considerable discussion in the community about the underlying structure of Pre-IPO products.

Currently, there are mainly two models in the market:

One is SPV mapping, where a special purpose vehicle actually holds the company's shares, with tokens mapped 1:1; the PreStocks integrated with Binance Wallet adopts this structure.

The other is synthetic mirroring, which issues synthetic tokens that track reference indices and do not directly correspond to real equity; Bitget's preSPAX falls into this category.

The common point of both models is that purchasing these products does not make you a shareholder of SpaceX in any sense, nor does it grant voting rights or dividend rights; SpaceX has also not authorized, recognized, or endorsed any form of this.

Additionally, these products trade in the OTC market, and liquidity and pricing transparency may be difficult to compare with stock exchanges.

Therefore, the opportunity for retail investors to participate in such Pre-IPOs is real, but it is necessary to clarify what layer of risk one is actually taking on before participating.

Conclusion

For the cryptocurrency community, whether it is tokenized Pre-IPOs or tokenized stocks, it is still very early days.

Product structures are being explored, regulatory frameworks are catching up, and the market scale is far from mature. Even if SpaceX successfully completes its IPO in 2026, the emergence of corresponding tokenized stock products on-chain is almost inevitable, but this will not grow into a truly significant market in the short term.

To put it more directly, exchanges like Bitget and Binance have a practical motivation behind launching such products. Over the past 1-2 years, the attention of cryptocurrency market users has been continuously drawn away by tech stocks and AI narratives. Topics like ChatGPT, Nvidia, and the arms race of large models have occupied a significant amount of discussion space that originally belonged to the cryptocurrency community. Cryptocurrency exchanges need to find a way to bring this group of people’s attention back, and moving the hottest Pre-IPO targets from the tech circle onto the blockchain is perhaps the most direct solution.

The story of SpaceX is both a real narrative of a hard tech company aiming for the largest IPO in history and an active attempt by the cryptocurrency world to attract attention from traditional finance.