The 180-Day Lease Holding Up SpaceX's $2 Trillion IPO

Buried on page 13 of SpaceX's S-1 prospectus is the line item that has done more to justify a reported $2 trillion valuation than any other single disclosure in the filing.

Anthropic, the rival AI company that Elon Musk publicly called "evil" earlier this year, is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion every month for compute capacity inside the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis. The filing describes the payments running through May 2029. Annualized, that amounts to $15 billion a year. Spread across the full term, the deal totals roughly $45 billion.

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Analyst notes have rapidly translated that disclosure into the bull case for SpaceX, which will trade under the ticker symbol SPCX after its planned IPO in June. The company can now tout secured revenue; bona fides for an AI infrastructure pivot; and a floor under the $4.28 billion in quarterly losses that an otherwise-profitable rocket and satellite business is now carrying. One pre-IPO research desk even called it "the strategic masterstroke ahead of the IPO."

Then Elon Musk got on X and clarified the terms.

"SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it's possible that may be what happens," Musk wrote. "The agreement is a 180-day lease with a mutual 90-day cancellation notice thereafter."

In other words, the $45 billion deal is actually a six-month rental.

What the S-1 Actually Says, and What It Leaves Out

The prospectus describes monthly payments of $1.25 billion through May 2029 and discloses that either party can terminate with 90 days' notice. It does not disclose that the underlying commitment is a 180-day lease.

Given that, investors reading the document without Musk's X clarification would reasonably model a multi-year contract with cancellation optionality. However, they would be wrong.

The distinction matters because of the way the rest of the SPCX valuation math works.

SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025. Starlink contributed $11.4 billion of that and posted a $4.4 billion operating profit, making it the only segment consistently profitable on a GAAP basis.

The rocket business (i.e., Falcon, Dragon, Starship) generated $4.1 billion in revenue and lost $657 million, with $3 billion of that flowing into Starship research and development.