Elon Musk Thinks SpaceX Can Hit $3.5 Trillion in Revenue. Wall Street Isn’t Buying It.

CEO Elon Musk believes SpaceX revenues are headed to the moon. Coming into Friday trading, shares of his rocket and AI company were a few dollars above their June $135 IPO price. (Courtesy SpaceX)

Key Points

• Elon Musk predicted SpaceX could reach $3.5 trillion in annual revenue by 2033, driven by artificial intelligence.
• The prediction is 35 times higher than the company’s expected 2027 sales of $100 billion.
• Wall Street projects SpaceX sales of $416 billion in 2030, which is far below Musk’s projections.

Elon Musk is never one to shy away from big goals. He made another bold prediction on Thursday.

He believes SpaceX could hit $3.5 trillion in annual revenue by 2033. That’s up 35-fold from expected 2027 sales of $100 billion, which implies an average annual growth rate of about 80%. It’s also about 3.5 times higher than Musk’s prediction that SpaceX could hit $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.

The debate started with a tweet on X about Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas’ long-term forecasts for SpaceX. In his July initiation report on SpaceX stock, Jonas projected $3.3 trillion in 2040 revenues. Musk thinks he’s being too conservative.

(Jonas rates SpaceX stock Buy and has a $300 price target.)

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Whenever it happens, AI is driving the growth. Jonas projects $2.6 trillion in AI revenue in 2040. Wall Street projects about $65 billion for 2027.

AI remains the greatest opportunity and risk for SpaceX and other stocks. Wall Street sees sales exploding. There’s good reason for that. Nvidia recently projected 70% growth in calendar year 2027. Wall Street was looking for closer to 45%. Alphabet’s cloud business grew 82% year over year in the second quarter. Its cloud services backlog at quarter-end was $514 billion, up almost 400% year over year. That represents enterprises locking in AI services for the future. Still, if revenue growth doesn’t materialize as fast as expected, valuations for AI stocks— including SpaceX—will come down.

No U.S. company generates $1 trillion in annual revenue yet. The soonest Wall Street sees that happening is 2028 for Amazon.com. It has a large AI business, but also has a huge online retail business. Amazon is a little like being Walmart and Microsoft combined. (That pair is expected to have a combined $1.3 trillion in 2028 sales.)

Wall Street projects SpaceX sales of $175 billion in 2028, $281 billion in 2029, and $416 billion in 2030. Those are nowhere near Musk’s projections. Someone, Musk or the Street, is going to be very wrong.

SpaceX stock wasn’t affected all that much by Musk’s bravado. Shares rose 0.9% on Thursday, while the Nasdaq added 1.6%. SpaceX stock was down 0.2% in premarket trading Friday at $140.61, while S&P 500 futures were down 0.1%.

Shares are on pace for a weekly gain after falling 2.2% this past week.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@barrons.com.

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