21 May 2026 SpaceX has filed the paperwork for its initial public offering (IPO), valuing the company at $1.75 billion. Official documents now show that Starlink is the only part of the business that is operationally profitable. Average revenue per customer is falling, which is a deliberate growth strategy. The IPO will take place on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX. The company is looking for money to accelerate growth. The foundations are in place, but the business is not yet financially and economically sustainable. SpaceX consists of three business units: Space, xAI and Connect. The latter is Starlink, the broadband provider that beams Internet down to Earth. At the end of 2025 it had 10.3 million subscribers. The company itself expects to grow to 25 million subscribers this year. Average monthly revenue per subscriber is actually moving in the opposite direction: downwards. This so-called ARPU fell from $99 per month in 2023 to $91 in 2024 and to $81 in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 the figure was even $66, a drop of almost 23% year-on-year. The prospectus explains that this is intentional. The company is not targeting a higher ARPU. The strategy is volume and margin, not price per customer. As Starlink moves further beyond North America into markets where purchasing power is lower and where the company is introducing cheaper subscriptions to keep the service affordable, the average revenue per user will naturally decline. SpaceX explicitly notes that this decline will continue in the coming years. In the first quarter of 2026, consumer subscriptions contributed $2.1 billion, well over half of the segment’s $3.3 billion in revenue. The rest comes from business and government customers, a category that includes companies such as United Airlines, Maersk and Carnival. And unlike the other two arms of SpaceX, Starlink is profitable. The Connectivity division booked an operating profit of $4.4 billion in 2025 and EBITA earnings of $7.2 billion. Those are the kind of figures you would sooner associate with a mature software company than with an infrastructure business that is still launching satellites into space at full tilt. It is not a pure like-for-like comparison, because with software it costs practically nothing extra to go from 1 to 100 to 1,000 items. An extra satellite always costs real money, because hardware. Starlink is the cash cow that keeps the rest of the group afloat. The company as a whole, incidentally, posted a net loss of $4.9 billion over 2025, mainly due to those AI investments. Business AM