SpaceX raises $337 million in new funding

In an SEC filing this week, SpaceX disclosed that the company has raised an additional $337 million in funding from 35 investors.

The Form D filed with the SEC on Wednesday (via Reuters) revealed that the first sale from this offering occurred on December 14.

In all, SpaceX raised $337,355,200. As of October, SpaceX was worth just over $100 billion, so this sale would equate to roughly one-third of a percent of the company. That valuation comes from a secondary stock sale at $560 per share, and at that price, this sale would have been 602,420 shares. Both of those numbers assume the value of the company has stayed roughly the same since then, which may not be the case.

An email Elon Musk sent that was obtained by Space Explored last month shed light on the severity of SpaceX’s issues with Raptor engine production and the potential financial risk SpaceX faces as a company as it prepares for the orbital launch debut of Starship.

In the email, he said that the “Raptor production crisis…turned out to be far more severe than was reported,” and continued that Starlink V1 satellites were financially weak, and the V2 satellites would need Starship. He concluded by stating that SpaceX could “face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”

As we said at the time, “Elon Musk is sharing the pressure that the timeline is necessary to keep the company on its ambitious path without scaling back operations that aren’t profitable yet” rather than stating a factual statement that SpaceX will go bankrupt. Musk later confirmed this on Twitter, saying only that bankruptcy would be “still unlikely, but not impossible” if a severe global repression dried up capital and SpaceX lost billions on Starship and Starlink.

While SpaceX has seen massive success with its Falcon 9, the company is investing tons of money into Starship and Starlink without seeing large returns yet. Starship still has months before it will fly orbitally and even longer before a customer payload. Likewise, the upfront cost of the Starlink terminals, satellites, and the launches to orbit are billions of dollars of investment that will take a significant amount of time to earn back. The Starlink network must continue to expand to more regions and gain more capacity to become a profitable part of SpaceX’s business.