Elon Musk and Sam Altman don’t often see eye to eye, as they made clear in their recent legal dispute. But when it comes to making outlandish projections about future growth, the two men seem to share a common philosophy.
SpaceX’s lead bank on its upcoming IPO, Goldman Sachs, has told investors it expects SpaceX’s revenue to hit $474 billion by 2030, from $18.7 billion last year. That’s even more ambitious than OpenAI’s projection—which we reported in February—that its revenue will grow to $284 billion by 2030 from $13 billion in 2025. Both companies also expect to burn massive amounts of cash in the same period, although #SpaceX 🚀 outdoes OpenAI on that count as well.
Neither of these sets of projections is particularly believable, of course. Sure, OpenAI might become a major player in digital advertising—a key part of its growth story—but it has presented little that would support the long-range forecasts it has put forward. SpaceX’s projections are no better. #The Information says two-thirds of the projected 2030 revenue would come from AI, which implies SpaceX thinks it will be bigger than OpenAI by then.
And yet right now, SpaceX’s AI unit is nowhere. Its revenue last year of $3.2 billion was mostly from ads generated by X, the business formerly known as Twitter, which doesn’t count as AI (the discourse on X could be better described as a lack of intelligence, artificial or otherwise). OpenAI, for all its travails, at least has real AI revenue, amounting to $5.7 billion in the first quarter. Moreover, constant employee turnover has turned xAI upside down, and the status of its model development is unclear. Musk has leased out much of its computing infrastructure to rivals such as Anthropic.
The credibility of these projections isn’t important to the Musk fans who are likely to support SpaceX’s stock offering, which is expected to go to market next week. But it is worth noting Musk’s dismal history of meeting projections. In 2022, for instance, he told investors he expected to lift Twitter’s revenue to $26.4 billion in 2028, up from $5 billion in 2021, according to this New York Times account.
How’s he doing? X’s ad business has dropped by half. (SpaceX’s IPO prospectus shows the AI segment’s revenue was $2.6 billion in 2024, “substantially all” of it from X.) Musk combined X into xAI, and the resulting AI unit is also generating revenue from selling subscriptions to its Grok AI chatbot and renting out computing capacity. Those X numbers are no longer relevant, but they are a reminder of the value of long-term revenue projections.
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