Elon Musk is never one to shy away from big goals. He made another bold prediction on Thursday.
He believes SpaceX could hit $3.5 trillion in annual revenue by 2033. That’s up 35-fold from expected 2027 sales of $100 billion, which implies an average annual growth rate of about 80%. It’s also about 3.5 times higher than Musk’s prediction that SpaceX could hit $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.
The debate started with a tweet on X about Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas’ long-term forecasts for SpaceX. In his July initiation report on SpaceX stock, Jonas projected $3.3 trillion in 2040 revenue. Musk thinks he’s being too conservative.
(Jonas rates SpaceX stock Buy and has a $300 price target.)
Whenever it happens, AI is driving the growth. Jonas projects $2.6 trillion in AI revenue in 2040. Wall Street projects about $65 billion for 2027.
AI remains the greatest opportunity and risk for SpaceX and other stocks. Wall Street sees sales exploding. There’s good reason for that. Nvidia recently projected 70% growth in calendar year 2027. Wall Street was looking for closer to 45%. Alphabet’s cloud business grew 82% year over year in the second quarter. Its cloud services backlog at quarter-end was $514 billion, up almost 400% year over year. That represents enterprises locking in AI services for the future. Still, if revenue growth doesn’t materialize as fast as expected, valuations for AI stocks—including SpaceX—will come down.
No U.S. company generates $1 trillion in annual revenue yet. The soonest Wall Street sees that happening is 2028 for Amazon.com. It has a large AI business, but also has a huge online retail business. Amazon is a little like being Walmart and Microsoft combined. (That pair is expected to have a combined $1.3 trillion in 2028 sales.)
Wall Street projects SpaceX sales of $175 billion in 2028, $281 billion in 2029, and $416 billion in 2030. Those are nowhere near Musk’s projections. Someone, Musk or the Street, is going to be very wrong.
SpaceX stock wasn’t affected all that much by Musk’s bravado. It might be getting a small bump. Shares rose 0.9% on Thursday, but the Nasdaq was strong, adding 1.6%. SpaceX stock was up 0.4% in early trading on Friday at $141.45, while the S&P 500 was up 0.5%.
Safe to say, if $3.5 trillion was investors’ expectation the stock would be much, much higher.
Friday gains left shares on pace for a 3.5% weekly gain after falling 2.2% this past week.