SpaceX’s 2018 and 2019 confidential financial records give us a first look at how much the company probably depends on its Starlink business unit and getting the Starship rocket online in order to start making money.

The detailed balance sheets are from five years ago, but they give a very close look at how one of the most important and mysterious private companies in the U.S. works. In November, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that SpaceX went from losing $2 billion in sales to supposedly making $9 billion in 2023 and $15 billion in 2024. These numbers help show what the company spent its money on and how much it spent it.

The company had two important years in 2018 and 2019: SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in February 2018. In March of that year, the company failed a key flight test of its crew Dragon capsule, but a month later, the same capsule exploded while being tested on the ground. SpaceX was probably under a lot of pressure to give NASA astronauts a safe, reliable spaceship so that it could start making more money from the huge government contract it won to carry crews.

Also, SpaceX sent up its first 60 Starlink satellites that year. The company’s main goal is to build a colony of humans on Mars, or, as CEO Elon Musk often says, “to expand the light of consciousness” throughout the universe. The service has become an important part of those plans.

Let’s look at it

Comprehensive balance sheets from those years that were looked at show that the company made $1.98 billion in sales in 2018 and $1.45 billion in 2019, but it had a net loss of -$308 million in 2018 and -$501 million in 2019. SpaceX changed how it reported revenue from the percentage of a total contract that was completed to the percentage of discrete aspects of each contract that were completed because of a change in accounting rules, which is why revenue went down from 2018 to 2019. I saw the documents that explained this. I asked SpaceX for a word on this story, but they didn’t answer.

Most of the losses were due to “cost of revenue,” which is a broad term for all the costs that come with making and selling a product or service. In this item, it also lists the prices of its employees and contractors, as well as the rent and utilities. SpaceX even takes into account the costs of reusing launch vehicle gear that has lost value over time.

Additionally, the business spent a lot of money on R&D—$559 million in 2018 and $661 million the following year. Companies often put the costs of hiring people in this line item; this is the “development” part of R&D. In SpaceX’s case, though, the financial statement says that these costs were mostly for the Starlink and Starship projects. SpaceX launched the first batch of operational Starlink satellites in May 2019, which was a significant advancement for the program. At the end of 2018, the company had $868 million in cash and cash equivalents. In 2019, they will have $990 million.

The balance sheets cover the years after NASA gave SpaceX contracts to take people and things to and from the International Space Station. Getting contracts with NASA from the U.S. government brought in 37% of the money in 2018 and 83% of the money in 2019. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise.

The company’s value grew to $180 billion at the end of last year. Since May 2019, when 60 Starlink satellites were launched, it has made truly huge progress: More than 5,500 active satellites are now in space, and more than 2.5 million people have signed up to use them. This is clear from the fact that sales are through the roof.

When Starship gets there, things might change again. The huge rocket is currently being tested in space from the company’s launch site in Texas. It will be needed to keep up the launch schedule for the second-generation satellites. These satellites will weigh almost twice as much as the first generation of satellites. Adding more satellites to orbit will help end users get more room.

It was in May 2022 that Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, said that Starship “is the only thing that can carry the Starlink 2 satellites.”

“Falcon [9] does not have the volume or the mass-to-orbit capability that Starlink 2 needs,” he said.

A lot of people have questions about SpaceX’s most recent financials. The company uses its own rocket, the Falcon 9, to launch its Starlink satellites. This lets it send the internet satellites into space at a rate that has never been seen before. The company can spread out the cost of gear over time because the rocket booster can be used more than once. But it will take longer to get Starlink to millions more people around the world if Starship doesn’t go live right away.