SpaceX skeptics concerned as Musk comments diverge from IPO filing

SpaceX filed for an initial public offering a week ago, and Elon Musk is already creating confusion.

Days before the reusable rocket maker is scheduled to start pitching its story to investors, Musk took to social network X, which is owned by SpaceX, late Wednesday to explain details of the company’s recent partnership with competing AI startup Anthropic. His comment included a potentially material aspect about their deal that wasn’t included in SpaceX’s 300-plus page IPO filing.

Earlier this month, SpaceX said it was leasing unused compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, to Anthropic. Last week’s prospectus said that Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX “$1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee.” The filing also said, “The agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”

In his X post Wednesday night, Musk wrote, “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years,” and called the pact a “180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter.” The prospectus, however, said nothing about the deal potentially ending in a matter of months.

Whether Anthropic is slated to pay SpaceX $15 billion a year for the next three years or will be spending substantially less over a much shorter period represents a major consideration for prospective investors. SpaceX’s total revenue in 2025 was just $18.7 billion, and selling compute capacity out of its data center adds an entirely new revenue stream, while putting SpaceX in competition with so-called neocloud providers such as Nebius and CoreWeave.

Some investors are already leery of buying into the largest IPO on record and backing a company that’s valued at over $1 trillion while burning billions of dollars a quarter. Musk’s post raises further questions about the company’s financial disclosures.

“The odd thing is that either Musk is correct and the S-1 is materially misleading, or the S-1 is correct and Elon is up to his old hijinx,” Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on corporate governance, wrote in an email. “But more than that it’s confusing to investors who are trying (best they can) to put a valuation on SpaceX.”

Anthropic declined to comment for this story, and representatives from SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Anthropic disclosure isn’t the only one in SpaceX’s filing that analysts have highlighted as less than thorough.

Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, catalogued an array of omissions in a report following the publishing of the prospectus.

“Critical disclosures are missing,” Granda wrote. He pointed to “subscriber churn” as well as “unit economics” for the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s partially reusable rocket, and “AI segment granularity,” writing that the company didn’t break out subscriptions to chatbot Grok or to X or provide details on…