SpaceX Has Plans for Mars, Shares for Humans --- The world's richest man needed lots of money -- and a moonshot. Starlink was born, and it's now SpaceX's biggest business.

“The mission of SpaceX is to "make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars."

 

Starlink was born of more earthly concerns.

 

"What's needed to create a city on Mars? Well, one thing's for sure: a lot of money," Elon Musk said in 2015 at the launch event for his latest moonshot. "So we need things that will generate a lot of money."

 

Musk laid out his radical vision of the future long before SpaceX had its sights on the biggest IPO in history. Even then, he knew that rockets alone wouldn't get his company to Mars. His only hope of establishing society on a freezing rock far, far away was blasting thousands of satellites into orbit.

 

A decade later, Starlink is now generating enough money to bankroll a company that burns through it at warp speed.

 

SpaceX may be known for building majestic rockets, firing those giant beasts of marvelous engineering into the skies and catching them with chopsticks. What's less known is that the company's extraordinary ambitions are fueled by an incredibly ordinary product: SpaceX has become an internet-service provider that also explores space.

 

The prospectus that it filed as SpaceX prepares for a massive initial public offering makes it clear that colonizing Mars and cracking AI is going to depend on selling Wi-Fi.

 

SpaceX consists of three segments: space, AI and connectivity, which is primarily driven by Starlink. Last year, the Starlink division was responsible for $11 billion of revenue, which amounted to more than 60% of the company's total sales. It was the most valuable part of the business -- and the only profitable one. And for years, it has been absolutely essential to the success of SpaceX. As it turns out, even companies that defy the laws of gravity are bound by the laws of economics.

 

The mysterious finances of Musk's company were detailed this week in SpaceX's IPO filing, which is far more bonkers than financial paperwork has any right to be.

 

The highlights include the company describing itself as "the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth," claiming a total addressable market of $29 trillion, revealing that Musk's pay package is tied to "the establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants" and declaring: "We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs."

 

But when it's not discussing existential perils of the universe, the document also happens to explain the business model of SpaceX.

 

It shows that the whole company is built on a powerful flywheel: SpaceX rockets launch Starlink satellites, and those Starlink satellites are the reason SpaceX can launch more rockets.

 

That virtuous cycle was Musk's vision from the earliest days of Starlink, as he told a room full of engineers that night more than a decade ago.

 

Before it provided a lifeline in dead zones, before it restored communications after natural disasters, before it beamed Wi-Fi into the middle of nowhere and metal tubes at 35,000 feet, Starlink was the solution to SpaceX's money problems.

 

At the time, SpaceX was basically a trucking business that charged governments and private companies to haul stuff into orbit. But that wasn't going to pay for civilization on another planet, so Musk went exploring for other spaces. There was nothing glamorous about selling internet access. The market was so large, though, that grabbing even a small percentage of it would produce revenue that exceeded NASA's entire budget, Musk told biographer Walter Isaacson.

 

But if it were easy to do, others would have done it. In fact, getting into the business of shooting satellites into low-Earth-orbit had always been a good way to wind up in bankruptcy. To him, the mission of Starlink was simple.

 

"We want to be in the not-bankrupt category," Musk said in 2020. "That's our goal."

 

To achieve this audacious goal, Musk's top engineers had to make satellites faster and cheaper -- so they applied "The Algorithm."

 

In the IPO paperwork, the company formally defines The Algorithm as a five-step process with the guiding principles of SpaceX: make less dumb, delete, optimize, accelerate, automate.

 

When he found out that Starlink satellites were being released individually, for example, Musk wondered why they couldn't be released at once.

 

"I was too chicken to propose that," said SpaceX rocket engineer Mark Juncosa, according to Isaacson's 2023 book. "Elon made us try it." And it worked. SpaceX says it has reduced the average manufacturing cost of a Starlink kit by 59% since 2022.

 

The rest of the business has been through its own dramatic transformation in that time.

 

Starlink had about 2 million subscribers back in 2023. Now there are more than 10 million.

 

In the early days, Musk dreamed of a network with 4,000 satellites, which was more than the total number of satellites in known existence. Now it has almost 10,000.

 

It took roughly five years of development before Starlink launched its first satellites and many of them failed. Now they're launching every three days and they always work.

 

All of which added up to one of the many eye-popping disclosures in the company's prospectus. SpaceX has plans to discover "trillion-dollar markets on the Moon, Mars and beyond," it said. But it didn't have to look that far to find the first one.

 

"We founded Starlink," the company bragged.

 

Starlink has already carried SpaceX farther than even Musk predicted. Now that it's landing on Wall Street, there's only another 140 million miles to Mars.

 

(See related article: "What It Takes to Launch the Largest IPO Ever --- A company with intergalactic ambitions now faces a process rooted in the 1980s to start trading its stock" -- WSJ May 23, 2026)” [1]

 

1. EXCHANGE --- Science of Success: SpaceX Has Plans for Mars, Shares for Humans --- The world's richest man needed lots of money -- and a moonshot. Starlink was born, and it's now SpaceX's biggest business. Cohen, Ben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 May 2026: B1.