Deep Dive: SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk walked out of a meeting in Moscow because a rocket cost too much.

On the flight home, he added up the raw materials inside one. They came to about 3% of the price. The other 97% was markup.

For sixty years, reaching orbit was so expensive that only governments could afford it. Twenty-five years after that flight home, SpaceX launches more than every other space program on Earth combined. NASA's Space Shuttle cost $54,500 per kilogram to reach orbit. SpaceX does it for about $2,700.

A cheap route changes who gets rich.

In 1497, Vasco da Gama found a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope and cut out the middlemen who had marked up pepper 20-30 times.

The companies that controlled that route became some of the most valuable in history. At its peak, the Dutch East India Company was worth about a third of the Dutch Republic's entire annual economy. Nvidia today is about 16% of America's.

SpaceX now controls the cheapest route to orbit. And that's what makes it so puzzling. In 2025 it brought in $18.7B of revenue, and lost money on a full operating basis. Yet the market values it at roughly three times what the entire space economy earns in a year. Either the market has lost its mind, or that route is worth far more than today's revenue shows.

The questions we couldn't put down

How does SpaceX build a whole rocket for less than NASA pays for one engine? NASA pays $99M for a single engine on its moon rocket, the Space Launch System. SpaceX builds an entire Falcon 9 for less than that. Both rockets have to survive the same physics on the way to orbit. So how does a whole rocket end up cheaper than one engine?

Why is SpaceX launching its biggest competitor's satellites? Amazon wants to take on Starlink with a network of its own, 3,236 satellites planned. To get them up, it signed Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' rocket company, for 24 launches. So far, Blue Origin has launched none of them. And with deadlines closing in, Amazon has been paying SpaceX to launch the satellites meant to compete with it. So why would SpaceX help it?

Why does a rocket company think its biggest market is software? Ask most people what SpaceX sells and they'll say rockets, or maybe internet. Yet SpaceX's own filing sizes its total market at $28.5T, and rockets and internet together are less than 7% of that. The biggest piece by far, $22.7T, is selling AI to businesses. So why does a rocket company see software as its biggest prize?

Why did Musk trade Mars for the Moon? From the start, the dream was a city on Mars. Then in February 2026, Musk changed course: a city on the Moon, built in under ten years. One clue sits in a USGS report about a lunar rock most people have never heard of, and it matters to anyone who depends on China for rare earths. So what is SpaceX really going to the Moon for?

And the questions behind those

How does a booster falling faster than sound land itself on a ship, with an ignition window of a tenth of a second? Why did the Pentagon raise its budget for SpaceX's military satellites from $900M to $13B? And what is an asteroid that headlines value in the quintillions actually worth?

My research team at Social Capital spent months on these, speaking with industry leaders and investors and stress-testing the story from the ground up.

For our paid subscribers, we go deep on every one of these questions, and the ones they lead to, in a 120+ page deep dive.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed above are current as of the date of this document and are subject to change without notice. Materials referenced above will be provided for educational purposes only. None of the above will include investment advice, a recommendation or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities or investment products.