SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images
Elon Musk says it’s “no longer impossible” that SpaceX will generate $1 trillion of revenue in 2028.
The SpaceX CEO said in August that his company projected that much revenue for 2030.
SpaceX would have to grow its revenue 53-fold in three years to reach Musk’s new figure.
Elon Musk always shoots for the moon , but he’s aiming even higher with his latest suggestion.
“As crazy as this sounds, $1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said in a Tuesday post on X.
As crazy as this sounds, $1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible https://t.co/jF3Wue95nL
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2026
That’s an even more ambitious timeframe than Musk has previously given. He said in August that SpaceX was internally projecting $1 trillion of revenue in 2030, and there was a “non-zero” chance it could reach that amount in 2029.
Musk made his latest pronouncement within hours of saying on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings webcast that annual recurring revenue could reach between $500 billion and $1 trillion by the end of 2027.
In a post-earnings note, JPMorgan forecast SpaceX would generate $254 billion of revenue in 2027.
If SpaceX were to generate $1 trillion in revenue in 2028, that would represent a 53-fold increase in three years. It earned just under $19 billion in 2025. It shared its historical financials prior to going public this summer.
After the bell on Tuesday, SpaceX — the company behind Falcon rockets, Starlink satellites, X, and AI chatbot Grok — posted close to $15 billion in revenue last quarter , up 161% from the same period of 2025.
The key driver was its super-intelligence division, where revenue surged 830%, from around $800 million to $7.6 billion. SpaceX attributed the growth to new cloud services agreements, around $600 million of revenue from its recent Cursor acquisition, and increased Grok adoption by enterprises.
To put Musk’s $1 trillion revenue figure in context, Amazon and Walmart, the two highest-revenue companies on the planet, both generated a little over $700 billion in net sales last financial year.
Musk is floating the possibility that SpaceX could generate more than 40% more revenue than either of them did last year, in about two years’ time.
It’s unclear whether Musk is including Tesla, which generated about $95 billion of revenue last year, in his newest revenue figure. He revealed on Tuesday that Tesla and SpaceX have formed committees to explore a potential merger.
Susannah Streeter, Wealth Club’s chief investment strategist, told Business Insider by email that a tie-up could “combine expertise in AI, chips, robotics and connectivity.”
But she added that “bringing two enormous businesses with very different operations and capital demands under one roof would be a hugely complex undertaking.”
Streeter said that notching $1 trillion in annual revenue in 2028 would be a “very tall order” and require an “extraordinary leap in the scale of the business.”
“Moving the goalposts from 2030 to 2028 suggests he is increasingly confident that several growth drivers could accelerate at once, but there is a difference between a target that is technically possible and one that is commercially realistic,” she added.
Neil Wilson, UK investor strategist at Saxo Bank, told BI by email that Musk’s latest revenue figure is “pushing it” and “would imply such an enormous pull-forward in demand as to defy credibility.”
Wilson added that he’d “never say never” about SpaceX hitting $1 trillion of revenue, “but by 2028 I’d say the chance is zero, whatever Elon says!”
Read the original article on Business Insider
