Elon Musk always shoots for the moon, but he’s aiming even higher with his latest suggestion.
“As crazy as this sounds, $1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said in a Tuesday post on X.
That’s an even more ambitious timeframe than Musk has previously given. He said in August that SpaceX was internally projecting $1 trillion of revenue in 2030, and there was a “non-zero” chance it could reach that amount in 2029.
Musk made his latest pronouncement within hours of saying on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings webcast that annual recurring revenue could reach between $500 billion and $1 trillion by the end of 2027.
In a post-earnings note, JPMorgan forecast SpaceX would generate $254 billion of revenue in 2027.
If SpaceX were to generate $1 trillion in revenue in 2028, that would represent a 53-fold increase in three years. It earned just under $19 billion in 2025. It shared its historical financials prior to going public this summer.
After the bell on Tuesday, SpaceX — the company behind Falcon rockets, Starlink satellites, X, and AI chatbot Grok — posted close to $15 billion in revenue last quarter, up 161% from the same period of 2025.
The key driver was its super-intelligence division, where revenue surged 830%, from around $800 million to $7.6 billion. SpaceX attributed the growth to new cloud services agreements, around $600 million of revenue from its recent Cursor acquisition, and increased Grok adoption by enterprises.
To put Musk’s $1 trillion revenue figure in context, Amazon and Walmart, the two highest-revenue companies on the planet, both generated a little over $700 billion in net sales last financial year.
Musk is floating the possibility that SpaceX could generate more than 40% more revenue than either of them did last year, in about two years’ time.
It’s unclear whether Musk is including Tesla, which generated about $95 billion of revenue last year, in his newest revenue figure. He revealed on Tuesday that Tesla and SpaceX have formed committees to explore a potential merger.
Neil Wilson, UK investor strategist at Saxo Bank, told Business Insider by email that SpaceX raking in $1 trillion of revenue by 2028 was “pushing it.”
That figure “would imply such an enormous pull-forward in demand as to defy credibility,” he said.
Wilson added that he’d “never say never” about SpaceX hitting $1 trillion of revenue, “but by 2028 I’d say the chance is zero, whatever Elon says!”
