Ark Investment Management’s Brett Winton said SpaceX could generate $300 billion in annual revenue by deploying tens of gigawatts of orbital data center capacity by the late 2020s at the current rental rates.
Winton, Ark’s chief futurist, gave that assessment Thursday ahead of the pricing of SpaceX’s record initial public offering, spelling out the math that he sees behind the company that is now the largest position in Ark’s venture fund. SpaceX’s opportunities include a new booster rocket and its lucrative Starlink satellite internet business.
“Starlink alone — it’s a six-month cash-on-cash return,” Winton said Thursday in a Bloomberg Television interview, because a SpaceX launch full of satellites costs about $500 million but will generate $1 billion annually across those units’ five-year lifespan.
Switching from the current Falcon 9 rockets to SpaceX’s new Starship at the same launch cadence would generate nearly $200 billion in revenue within two years just from Starlink satellites, without requiring the 1,000 annual launches needed to meet Elon Musk’s ambitious target of 1 million tons of cargo in orbit within five years, Winton said.
Ark has projected SpaceX could reach a $2.5 trillion enterprise value by 2030, though the company reported a $4.28 billion loss for the first quarter despite Starlink’s profitability. Winton said SpaceX’s AI operations don’t need to succeed for investors to achieve strong returns, though profitability depends on how much capital the company deploys toward terrestrial data centers to compete with frontier AI labs.
Like other investors backing SpaceX in private markets, Winton said Musk may opt to fold in SpaceX and his publicly traded Tesla Inc. — a step that the billionaire took earlier this year when he combined SpaceX and xAI.
“It’s a reasonable assumption — more likely than not” once the restrictions around the IPO are lifted, Winton said. “It makes a ton of strategic sense.”
(This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.)