For years, Elon Musk has been making big promises about SpaceX (SPCX). This time, one of Wall Street’s best-known investors is doing it for him.
Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, described a future in which SpaceX’s Starship could generate $1 billion in revenue with each flight.
The numbers grow much larger after that. Wood said Musk’s goal is 10,000 Starship flights each year by 2030, Investor’s Business Daily reported. If we count $1 billion in potential revenue per trip, that generates an incredible $10 trillion in annual Starship revenue.
“It’s not impossible,” Musk said in response to Wood’s post on X (the former Twitter). Still, investors want to understand the logic behind the numbers.
That $10 trillion is not SpaceX’s prediction. It is extrapolated using ARK’s projections of Starlink’s current revenue per unit of network capacity and the additional capacity future-generation Starlink V3 satellites may contribute when launched onboard Starship.
Wood’s own company anticipates that the monetization rate will drop as capacity grows. And Musk has already suggested a much more modest amount for SpaceX’s total 2030 revenue.
That makes Wood’s projection less of a traditional forecast and more of a demonstration of precisely how ARK views Starship’s economic potential.
Cathie Wood sees $1 billion opportunity in each Starship launch
Wood’s argument begins with the level of communications capacity Starship could deliver into orbit. “Each Starship launch could generate $1 billion in revenue,” Wood wrote on X.
Musk’s aim of 10,000 flights a year could, in theory, equal $10 trillion a year in Starship revenue by 2030, she claimed. That would dramatically shift the context in which people discuss SpaceX’s value.
Wood said SpaceX’s roughly $1.75 trillion IPO valuation could eventually look like a deep-value opportunity.
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Musk’s response consisted of only three words: “It’s not impossible.”
The math underlying Wood’s prediction comes from ARK researcher Sam Korus, who believes that Starlink currently monetizes about $19 million in revenue per terabit per second of network capacity, TipRanks noted.
A Starship launch might add approximately 61 Tbps of capacity under ARK’s estimate. At the current pace of monetization, this could mean around $1 billion in connection revenue tied to the capacity added by a Starship launch.
A vital qualification is necessary, however. Korus anticipates revenue per Tbps to fall when Starlink adds much more capacity.
For this reason, simply scaling today’s predicted monetization rate over thousands of future Starship launches should not be seen as a traditional revenue projection.
Wood’s $10 trillion number extrapolates the potential economics, assuming that expected huge launch volumes and monetization fall into place.
SpaceX itself isn’t directing $10 trillion in revenue.
SpaceX’s Starlink V3 satellites are central to ARK’s math
There is nevertheless a technological foundation behind ARK’s calculation.
Each Starlink V3 satellite is planned to provide 1 Tbps of downlink bandwidth, and Starship might potentially carry as many as 60 V3 satellites into space on one launch.
A single Starship flight would supply more than 20 times the Starlink downlink bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch.
Those metrics help explain why ARK doesn’t see Starship as just a cheaper or bigger launch vehicle.
If Starship can help SpaceX send far more communications capacity into orbit on each flight, the rocket might become a key engine for extending Starlink’s commercial network.
And SpaceX is nearing a major test of that premise.
Musk confirmed on Tuesday, Sept. 15, that SpaceX plans to begin deploying its next-generation Starlink V3 constellation this month.
The company is eyeing Sept. 22 for Starship Flight 14, pending regulatory permission. The mission is slated to be Starship’s maiden orbital flight and will launch the operational deployment of the V3 satellites, Benzinga reported.
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The change may also signify a major shift in Starship economics.
This month, SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen told Benzinga that Flight 14 will be Starship’s first “revenue-generating flight” carrying manufacturing V3 satellites.
So far, most of the Starship tale has been about engineering, testing, and the long-term vision of making large-scale space transportation reusable. The operational V3 deployment starts to put a business use case behind that technical work.
Whether it can eventually sustain something like Wood’s $10 trillion vision is another matter entirely.
Bloomberg / Getty Images
Elon Musk has offered a much smaller SpaceX revenue number
The $10 trillion number from Wood seems more stark against Musk’s public pronouncements.
Musk said in June that SpaceX “might be able to reach approximately $1T revenue in 2030.” That’s still a phenomenal number, but it’s only one-tenth of the annual Starship revenue in Wood’s projection.
The contrast is essential because it shows the gap between what Wood is doing and official business guidelines.
Wood is using ARK’s predictions of Starlink monetization and Starship-delivered capacity and projecting them out over Musk’s exceedingly ambitious future deployment cadence.
SpaceX isn’t telling investors to anticipate revenue of $10 trillion a year. In fact, Benzinga said the company had sales of $18.67 billion in 2025.
If SpaceX were to achieve $1 trillion in yearly sales by 2030, its revenue would need to climb to more than 53 times the level reported for 2025.
To give you some idea of the scope of Wood’s scenario, a $10 trillion conclusion would be more than 535 times the company’s stated 2025 revenue.
The model also makes one other significant assumption: 10,000 launches a year, which would mean nearly 27 Starship launches per day, on average.
To achieve that cadence, SpaceX would need a level of reusable-rocket operations that is orders of magnitude greater than anything it’s doing now. Regulatory permissions, launch infrastructure, manufacturing, turnaround times, satellite output, and client demand would all be significant.
Several bold assumptions must hold true at once in Wood’s scenario.
But that’s what makes Musk’s comment so interesting. He neither said the $10 trillion figure was implausible nor closed the door on it.
SpaceX’s $10 trillion scenario faces a very high bar
ARK’s assessment gives investors a helpful framework for thinking about Starship, as Investor’s Business Daily noted, as long as the $10 trillion number is not misinterpreted as a projection.
The economic argument is not only that SpaceX can launch a bigger rocket.
It’s also that a large, reusable Starship might provide substantially more Starlink capacity, possibly enabling SpaceX to monetize communications infrastructure at a scale unattainable with its current launch architecture.
Starlink V3 is a key part of that argument. Each satellite is expected to have far more capacity, and Starship is supposed to be able to put much more of that capacity into orbit each launch than Falcon 9.
Flight 14 may start to test the business side of that argument.
But the gap between the first money-making Starship flight and 10,000 launches a year is huge. So is the gap between SpaceX’s estimated 2025 revenue of $18.67 billion, as Reuters reported, and either $1 trillion or $10 trillion.
One of the main constraints in the estimate is something ARK’s own researcher James Wang admits: Revenue gained per Tbps is projected to fall as network capacity grows.
This phenomenon is what makes extrapolation along a straight line so dangerous. For SpaceX to profitably build out a massive Starlink capacity increase, demand would have to match it.
However, Wood’s theory explains why investors put such a high value on Starship. If the rocket finally becomes quickly reusable and greatly increases the frequency of its launches, its worth to SpaceX might much exceed the revenue from outside launch clients.
It might be the infrastructure that will let SpaceX scale Starlink at an unprecedented speed.
For now, $10 trillion remains Wood’s extrapolation, not SpaceX guidance. Musk himself has floated roughly $1 trillion of potential SpaceX revenue in 2030.
But when Wood suggested that Starship alone could eventually produce 10 times that amount annually, Musk did not dispute her claim.
He only said it wasn’t impossible.
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