SpaceX could make $500 billion in 2028, Elon Musk says

SpaceX is famous for launching, and landing, its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and sending astronauts to space aboard its Dragon crew capsule. But that was just the beginning. Musk laid out just how deeply SpaceX is diving into AI during his 29-minute talk, which came a week after SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call as a public company. "Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX; I'd say five years for sure," Musk said. "And the value of SpaceX will be some astronomical number." Astronomical is right. According to Musk, the company aims to get 10 gigawatts of AI compute up and running . That's a big jump from its current 1.4 GW, which SpaceX sells to tech companies and AI labs. "The value per watt is probably going to be 30 to $50, which means if we bring 10 gigawatts of AI online , it will be 300 to $500 billion a year in revenue," he said. "Big numbers." And those numbers will get even bigger over time, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX just announced plans to build a gigantic complex in Texas called Terafab, a joint operation with Tesla that will manufacture advanced semiconductor chips for a wide range of applications. And the company aims to launch a million of its "Starmind" AI satellites to low Earth orbit in the coming years using its fully reusable Starship megarocket, which is still in development. Over the longer haul, the company plans to establish factories on the moon that will build these off-Earth data centers. The satellites will be launched into space from the lunar surface via electromagnetic mass drivers — basically, high-powered rail guns. SpaceX envisions Starmind and its other AI efforts as returning almost unimaginable profits down the road. For example, in paperwork the company filed just before its record-breaking IPO, SpaceX identified an eventual "total addressable market" of $28.5 trillion, nearly $23 trillion of it in the AI field. It was corrected at p. m. Spaceflight and Tech Editor Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space. com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.