Key Takeaways
- SpaceX shares rose more than 5% on Friday after a week of launches, including Starship’s first trip to Earth orbit.
- Decoder host Nilay Patel says Musk is “just behind” in AI, and Musk has said himself that Grok trails Anthropic’s newest model.
- For now, SpaceX’s AI money comes from renting out computing power, which Jim Cramer puts at $11 billion a year from Google and $15 billion from Anthropic.
- The next two Grok releases are the ones to watch, since SpaceX ships a new model every month or two.
SpaceX (SPCX) just had a huge week on the rocket side. Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time and deployed all 26 Starlink V3 satellites on board. Dragon carried NASA’s Crew-13 astronauts to the International Space Station. And a rideshare mission put a Project Suncatcher satellite into orbit for Alphabet (GOOG), to test whether Google’s AI chips can do their work in space.
Shares climbed more than 5% on Friday morning.
But the AI side of SpaceX just got some cold water.
On the latest episode of Decoder, host Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, put it bluntly: “I think Elon is just behind.”
He pointed to Musk’s own words as proof. Musk, Patel said, is “out there saying Grok is not competitive at the frontier and it will take until the next two versions of Grok to be totally competitive with Anthropic.”
That’s quite the admission from the man who owns Grok.
Musk said much the same in a recent interview with China Media Group. He admitted Grok 4.7 isn’t as good as Anthropic’s new Opus 5.5 and said: “We probably catch up to frontier sometime next year, most likely.”
So where does the AI money come from?
Here’s the thing: SpaceX’s AI business already brings in serious money, and that money doesn’t depend on Grok beating anyone.
SpaceX bought a huge number of GPUs from Nvidia (NVDA), and it rents that computing power out. As Jim Cramer put it on Monday’s Mad Money: “Elon Musk is renting them out to Google at an $11 billion a year run rate, and he has a similar deal with Anthropic at a $15 billion run rate.” (The Anthropic deal starts in October.)
Add those up and you get $26 billion a year. That’s about $2.17 billion a month, paid by two companies that compete with Grok.
Now set that against what Wall Street expects SpaceX to bring in. Consensus calls for $44.7 billion of revenue in 2026, and more than double that, $114 billion, in 2027.
At Cramer’s run rates, those two rental deals alone would be close to a quarter of the 2027 estimate (assuming both run at full speed all year).
All that computing power didn’t come cheap. SpaceX’s capital spending grew nearly fivefold in two years, from $4.42 billion in 2023 to $20.9 billion in 2025.
(That spending covers rockets and Starlink too, so not every dollar went to GPUs.)
Isn’t Grok catching up fast?
The obvious objection is speed. Musk says SpaceX’s AI arm puts out a new model “roughly every month or 2.” Last week he also touted Grok 4.7’s top ranking on Artificial Analysis’ cyber index, posting “Grok 4.7 rank 1 on AA cyber index.” (TIKR covered that ranking on Oct. 2.) At that pace, two more versions could arrive within a few months.
Of course, Anthropic isn’t standing still. Opus 5.5 only came out on Sept. 22, and the frontier will likely have moved by the time Grok gets there. Topping one benchmark is also a narrow win. By Musk’s own account, Grok still trails overall.
The upshot
For now, I’d value SpaceX’s AI arm as a landlord. The rent is real, it comes from two of the biggest names in AI, and the larger deal starts this quarter. Grok reaching the frontier is an option on top of that, and Musk himself puts it about a year away.
Levi Strauss built a fortune in the California Gold Rush by selling supplies to the miners. Same deal here.
So is SpaceX competitive at the frontier? Not yet, and Musk is the first to say so. Of course, with a new Grok every month or two, that could change quickly. The next two releases will tell us.
So what is SpaceX stock actually worth?
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR’s valuation model and see what SpaceX could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It’s free to use.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
