Elon Musk: Achieving $1 Trillion Revenue by 2028 is No Longer Impossible
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated on social media that achieving $1 trillion in revenue by 2028 is no longer impossible.
This statement came hours after the company's third-quarter earnings call, where Musk projected that by the end of 2027, annual recurring revenue would fall between $500 billion and $1 trillion. He expressed high confidence in adding approximately 10 GW of computing power, with a non-zero probability of achieving 20 GW of superintelligent computing power by the end of 2027.
Previously, the internal timeline for reaching $1 trillion in revenue was moved up from 2031 to 2030, and this latest statement compresses the timeline further to 2028. The total revenue for the third quarter reached $14.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 161%, with the superintelligent segment contributing $7.56 billion and becoming the largest business for the first time.
The company currently has a nameplate computing power of 1.7 GW, aiming to increase it to 2.5 to 3 GW by the end of the year, deploying at a rate of approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs per month, and will later shift to the Vera Rubin architecture, planning to launch a large training cluster of 440,000 GPUs by mid-2027. The power and cooling infrastructure is also targeted to advance to an incremental 20 GW level.
The adjusted EBITDA for the superintelligent segment is $5 billion, with capital expenditures of $19.6 billion mainly for AI infrastructure. The company has signed multiple external cloud service agreements, with an annualized computing power leasing revenue of approximately $41.1 billion, aiming to exceed $100 billion in ARR by the end of the year, with clients including Anthropic and Google Cloud.
Musk noted that the computing power team and the rocket team are the same group of people, with the latter achieving 96% of launch quality sent into space, comparing this team in the computing power field to the New York Yankees participating in minor leagues. The company has approximately $90 billion in cash and securities to support a high capital expenditure pace.
The funding flow is driven by internal cash reserves and customer prepayments, reinforcing capital expectations for computing power expansion. Beneficiaries include Nvidia chip suppliers and power cooling equipment vendors, while those under pressure include risks related to grid access, land, and project delivery timelines.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Elon Musk's companies have repeatedly advanced revenue and capacity timelines. SpaceX has evolved from reusable rocket iterations to dominating global launch quality, while xAI has integrated the Grok model with Cursor and launched Grok Bot. Historical patterns show that they compress milestones through vertical integration and high capital expenditures, but also have a record of public delays and execution deviations.
The capital strategy involves directly transplanting rocket system engineering capabilities to computing clusters, locking in external customer prepayments with a monthly deployment of 200,000 GPUs and pre-built power cooling, while also serving internal model training. The motivation is to leverage existing cash and a capital recovery cycle of less than a year to convert scale advantages into computing delivery speed and pricing power, rather than relying solely on external financing.
This is similar to early AWS opening e-commerce infrastructure or Tesla extending battery capacity to energy storage. SpaceX is transitioning from a launch and connectivity service provider to a computing infrastructure controller, moving from vertical integration expansion to platform output. The current pace of computing scaling has already surpassed the historical curves of traditional cloud vendors.
Essentially, this represents a restructuring of the industry chain and a transfer of pricing power: by self-building power cooling and chip deployment rhythms, they control the timing and cost of AI computing supply. The mechanism involves locking in customer orders with high capital expenditures upfront, then creating barriers through rapid delivery, making competitors passively follow in power and cluster delivery rather than simply relying on technological substitution.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Advancing timelines equal re-pricing of capital and execution power.
- The same team migrating across fields makes system capabilities more valuable than single technologies.
- Customer prepayments come first, infrastructure is built later, and speed determines pricing power.