Elon Musk says his best guess for SpaceX ~$3.5T revenue is roughly around 2033.
This could after adding 10-20 Gigawatts per year of earth based data centers from 2027 to 2033 and adding 100 Gigawatts per year of space based data centers from 2030-2033. This would be about 500 gigawatts of cumulative ai data center.
This would be a decline in the revenue per gigawatt per year towards about $5-10 billion per gigawatt per year.
My best guess for ~$3.5T revenue is roughly around 2033 fwiw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2026
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
How is SpaceEx going to solve the heat shield issue? From what I understand, even the latest heat shields will not be suitable for rapid re-use.
The heat shield protected the last Starship that landed intact in the ocean. If there had been a catch tower there then Starship would have been caught.
There are some tiles that need to be replaced. But even if they had to replace all tiles and the underlayment, that would take 2 weeks and cost $2 million or about 5% of the cost of Starship. So monthly reuse is basically possible already. Reusing the super heavy booster needs no heat shield. And they have caught two super heavy boosters and reused two of them.
Rapid reuse of the booster would have over 80% of the engines and 80% of the cost. Getting back Starships for monthly reuse means having ~8% of the annual launch rate in Starships. They will improve the heat shield to not lose tiles and get to rapid reuse but if they had to reduce the inspection and repair or replace heat shield time to 2-7 days that would mean keeping a smaller fleet of Starships for reuse. Multiples of the daily launch rate.
Nuts
but plausible