ARK's Winton says each Starship launch could add $700 million a year

Brett Winton, ARK Invest’s chief futurist, argued on Friday that investors are underrating SpaceX’s earning power. 

Winston estimates that every Starship flight could throw off more than $700 million in fresh annual revenue. On the same day, he made his post, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) shares jumped due to a run of successful launches and expanding AI contracts. 

How much is SpaceX capable of earning? 

Writing on X under the handle @wintonARK, Brett Winton said that people do not “grok” what the pairing of Starship with Starlink can generate. On ARK’s numbers, he wrote, each launch “could drive $700 million in incremental annual revenue.” He added that he expects that figure to climb as SpaceX begins monetizing AI software through its satellite effort.

Space Exploration Technologies climbed about 6% to roughly $158.86 by late Friday morning, lifting its market capitalization back to about $2.0 trillion.

The increase was due to two factors. First, SpaceX ran three missions inside 13 hours, sending a Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station, flying its 18th Transporter rideshare mission with 130 payloads, and launching a National Reconnaissance Office satellite on a Falcon Heavy before recovering the boosters. 

The second reason for the increase in value was a June agreement with Alphabet that pays SpaceX $920 million a month across 32 months, or $29.4 billion in total. A separate Anthropic contract adds $1.25 billion a month to the company’s revenue, allowing SpaceX to pull in close to $2.2 billion a month from AI services, even more than it earns launching rockets.

ARK expects $2.5 trillion from SpaceX

ARK, working with aerospace research firm Mach33, published an open-source model in June 2025 that estimates SpaceX will be worth about $2.5 trillion in 2030. The model’s bull case rises to near $3.1 trillion, while its bear case falls to about $1.7 trillion. The base figure represents roughly 38% annual growth from SpaceX’s $350 billion December 2024 round.

ARK’s open-source SpaceX valuation model runs a million simulations on 17 separate inputs. Its revenue engine is a bandwidth demand model that, on average, sees Starlink capacity leveling off near 130 million gigabits per second, which is the point beyond which ARK judges extra bandwidth uneconomic.

After SpaceX debuted on Nasdaq at $150 a share in June and then declined, ARK bought about $32.5 million of stock on top of a $444.3 million purchase on the first trading day. SpaceX listed at an IPO valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion.

The company’s Chief Executive, Cathie Wood, said in a July interview that SpaceX is a company that “could become the most important company in global history,” even as the stock sat well below its $225.64 intraday peak and faced a $116 billion share unlock. 

Notably, on September 24, ARK put the tokenized version of its ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum through Securitize, letting eligible U.S. investors to subscribe with USDC. SpaceX is the fund’s top position at 7.54%.

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