Musk: SpaceX Revenue “Will Drop” If Compute Becomes “Plentiful and Cheap” Gian Estrada Mon, November 9, 2026 at 12:47 PM EST 4 min read SPCX +4.94% NVDA -5.10% ANTH.PVT Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Elon Musk said on X on Nov. 8 that SpaceX's revenue will drop if compute becomes plentiful and cheap.
SpaceX rents compute at about spot prices, so its AI business wins while compute is scarce and shrinks if supply catches up.
Analysts expect SpaceX's revenue to reach $335 billion in 2028, while Nvidia's sales are expected to more than quadruple, the new supply behind talk of a compute glut.
On the latest All-In podcast, Chamath Palihapitiya picked the deal he thinks matters most in AI: the compute contract between SpaceX (SPCX:NASDAQ) and Anthropic, which either side can end on 90 days' notice.
If SpaceX ended it, he argued, "It allows SpaceX to reprice that compute at the spot rate, which is probably double." Maybe triple, he added.
When a clip went around X on Nov. 8, Elon Musk didn't take a victory lap: "It works both ways, of course. If compute becomes plentiful and cheap, SpaceX revenue will drop." Then: "No crying in the casino for either party."
That's unusually candid for a CEO. On the Oct. 20 call, Musk said SpaceX rents at "effectively the spot market rate," and CFO Bret Johnsen said pricing was tracking slightly above the top of a $30-to-$50-per-watt range.
So Chamath's "double" needs the Anthropic contract to sit well below the market, or spot prices to keep climbing. The rest reprices as short contracts renew, either way.
And AI is now most of the company. AI brought in $7.56 billion of SpaceX's $14.6 billion of third-quarter revenue, and one AI customer supplied 34.5% of the total.
Analysts expect SpaceX's revenue to rise nearly 7x from 2026 to 2028, and much of that depends on how much compute SpaceX builds and what it rents for.
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The glut call isn't crazy. SpaceX alone has nearly tripled its quarterly capital spending in a year, and it guides fourth-quarter capex to $35 billion to $40 billion.
Much of that money goes to chipmakers like Nvidia, whose revenue analysts expect to more than quadruple, from $216 billion in the year ended January 2026 to $903 billion in the year ending January 2029. Pricier chips aside, that's a lot of hardware headed for data centers, and if it comes online faster than demand grows, rents fall.
Palihapitiya disagrees. In his own reply to the clip, he tied his scenario to spot prices moving "50%+ because of the lack of supply," and wrote that "odds will go up with every data center delay."
Last week, Democrats won both chambers of Congress, and Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on an immediate data center moratorium, though she'd need the legislature. Per Wells Fargo, Texas holds 27% of planned US data center gigawatts.
But SpaceX is also a builder. It ended September with 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate compute and expects 2.5 to 3 gigawatts by year-end. A freeze that props up rents would also cap how much SpaceX can rent out.
SpaceX's pricing power is real today. Musk said in October that renewals are coming in "at higher dollars per watt," and 67% of the $63 billion backlog is due within a year. But short contracts cut both ways: if compute becomes plentiful, renewals reprice lower, and the further out the estimate, the more it rides on rents holding. I wouldn't treat today's shortage as permanent.
The next check is first-quarter 2027 revenue, guided to $33 billion to $37 billion.
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