ARK Invest's chief futurist Brett Winton argued Friday that investors are underestimating SpaceX's earning power, projecting that every Starship flight could generate more than $700 million in incremental annual revenue. Winton said the pairing of Starship with Starlink is not fully understood and expects the figure to climb as SpaceX begins monetizing AI software through its satellite network.
SpaceX shares climbed about 6% to roughly $158.86 by late Friday morning, lifting the company's market capitalization back to about $2.0 trillion. The move followed an intense launch stretch: three missions inside 13 hours. A Falcon 9 carried NASA's Crew-13 mission with four astronauts to the International Space Station and made the fastest American crewed trip to the station in under eight hours. A Transporter-18 rideshare mission carried 130 commercial payloads, including Google's Project Suncatcher, a prototype testing AI computing in space. A Falcon Heavy launched a classified National Reconnaissance Office payload, and SpaceX recovered four boosters across the three missions. Earlier in the week, Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite one engine failing during ascent.
The company's Starlink-focused connectivity segment posted $4.3 billion in revenue and $1.7 billion in operating profit last quarter. The launch business recorded $962 million in revenue and a $542 million operating loss, partly because internal Starlink launches are not recorded as launch revenue. The newer AI compute unit posted $2.6 billion in sales and a $1.3 billion loss, with $15.8 billion in capital expenditures. A June agreement with Alphabet pays SpaceX $920 million a month across 32 months, or $29.4 billion in total, while a separate Anthropic contract adds $1.25 billion a month. That puts SpaceX's AI services revenue near $2.2 billion a month, with potential to reach $3.4 billion a month as capacity comes online.
ARK, working with aerospace research firm Mach33, published an open-source model in June 2025 that estimates SpaceX will be worth about $2.5 trillion in 2030, with a bull case near $3.1 trillion and a bear case around $1.7 trillion. The base case implies roughly 38% annual growth from SpaceX's $350 billion December 2024 round. ARK bought about $32.5 million of SpaceX stock after the post-IPO decline, on top of a $444.3 million purchase on the first trading day. Cathie Wood, ARK's chief executive, has said SpaceX could become the most important company in global history.
From a crypto perspective, ARK on September 24 put a tokenized version of its ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum through Securitize, allowing eligible U.S. investors to subscribe with USDC. SpaceX is the fund's top position at 7.54%. The move highlights growing real-world asset tokenization and gives Ethereum and USDC direct exposure to traditional venture-fund access.
