Elon Musk’s SpaceX released its S-1 document on Wednesday, ahead of its planned IPO filing. The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission filing provides some interesting notes on the valuation of the combined SpaceX/xAI/X Corp entity, which now oversees virtually all of Musk’s non-Tesla business interests.
The document shares more specific insight into the performance of each company under the broader SpaceX umbrella, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which was rolled into xAI back March 2025. xAI was then acquired by SpaceX in February as part of a corporate restructure.
That means that X is about to become a public company once again, which could mean it will be releasing specific insight into performance metrics, including active user counts and revenue.
Or it may all be obscured under broader notes from SpaceX.
Either way, within the S-1 overview, there are some interesting data notes, including:
- X has about 550 million users, which is lower than the 600 million MAU that X has repeatedly claimed over the past two years.
- X’s 550 million users, as of March 2026, is up from 520 million in December 2025, as per the filing.
- X users cumulatively generate about 350 million posts in the app each day. In 2023, X reported that its users generated 500 million posts per day, broken down to 100 million original posts, 100 million replies and 300 million quotes and reposts. It’s not clear how this 350 million number is broken down.
- The Grok chatbot from xAI currently sees about 117 million monthly active users, which means only around 21% of X users are using Grok.
- X and Grok subscriptions increased by $365 million in 2025.
- X and xAI currently have approximately 6.3 million active paid subscribers, comprising about 4.4 million X Premium and Premium+ paid subscribers and about 1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers. That means that fewer than 1% of X’s user base is paying for X Premium.
- In 2025, xAI reported a loss from operations of $6.4 billion, versus $3.2 billion in revenue. By contrast, in 2022 X generated $4.4 billion in ad revenue, according to Investopedia.
In addition to these usage and subscriber figures, the SpaceX filing also outlines key areas of potential growth for the business, including how it plans to grow X and Grok usage.
“We intend to drive X revenue growth by increasing engagement across our users, increasing X Premium subscriber conversion, growing advertising revenue per user, and diversifying our advertising base,” the company said in the filing.
The company also pointed to its planned evolution of X into an everything app, which will eventually integrate real-time information, communications, media, payments, banking, and more “within one consumer app experience,” the company said. Though there was no update on the rollout of X Money or in-stream payments, which have been delayed by regulatory hurdles.
The only mention on that front was that X Money was launched in beta in November 2025.
“We also expect to grow advertising revenue per user and to diversify our advertiser base over time because of X’s compelling advertiser value proposition — large-scale user engagement, real-time content, and advanced AI-driven performance marketing tools,” the company said.
X’s ad revenue has declined significantly since Elon Musk took over the app in 2022. While there have been some signs of advertisers returning to the platform, the numbers in the filing suggest that the app is still a long way from regaining its advertiser momentum.
As noted above, for the full year 2022, which was the last year before Musk took over at the app, Twitter generated $4.4 billion, with around 90% of that attributed to ad revenue. X generated $1.8 billion in ad sales in 2025.
“We intend to drive further advertising revenue growth by improving our performance advertising capabilities, embedding AI to optimize ad campaigns, and launching richer ad formats, including those that increase advertiser return on ad spending and their spend with us,” the company said.
The filing also left the door open to ads in Grok. “Currently, Grok API access is not included in our advertising rates to advertisers,” the company said. “We do not currently sell or offer advertisers the ability to place ads on the Grok API.”
“Do not currently,” seems to indicate that this may be a consideration in future.
The document also outlined what xAI sees as the potential of its offering.“We believe Grok represents a differentiated approach to AI, grounded in a core objective of truth seeking and powered by continuous, proprietary access to real-time data inflows through its integration with X,” the company said. “With approximately 350 million daily posts, X enables freshness, relevance, and contextual awareness for Grok that we believe is a competitive differentiator.”
Given the concerns about X content overall, which some believe is dominated by bots and political influence operations, that may not be the selling point that X seems to believe. However, the company is pitching X usage as a key selling point for its AI projects, which also underlines why X is so keen to clean up its feed and remove spam and junk posts.
But the main focus of the SpaceX overview is the potential of its orbital data centers, and providing infrastructure to the next generation of AI projects.
A recently signed data center access deal between xAI and Anthropic will see Anthropic pay $15 billion per year for access to xAI’s Colossus data facilities, according to the filing.
The next stage of this is data centers in space, which SpaceX is confident will be a major opportunity.
“We believe our next trillion-dollar market is AI compute, and we expect to leverage our rockets and satellites for massive orbital deployments of AI infrastructure,” the company said. “We believe this AI compute infrastructure will help us develop and monetize the Grok model faster than other AI companies that are dependent on finite sources of power on Earth. No other company has built the capabilities to create value across all these end markets at scale.”
There’s some question here as to the potential of Grok itself to be able to capitalize on this, if the space data center plan actually works out, and it could be that SpaceX becomes an infrastructure provider, as opposed to an AI player in its own right.
But either way, orbital data centers are a big part of the company’s outlook, with the S-1 document also including a heap of depictions of spaceships and rockets launching.
Overall, the SpaceX filing provides an optimistic overview of an ambitious outlook, which largely hinges on non-tested space-based developments to solidify the company’s prospects.
The X app is a smaller player within this, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the social platform remains a key focus in the organization’s new push, or it gets relegated in favor of larger goals.
