Since its founding in 2002, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has grown to become a leading player in commercial space launch and a key contractor for the US government. However, a new investigation shows that its dominance may be due not only to technological breakthroughs, but also to large-scale tax optimization over the past two decades.
How reports According to The New York Times, SpaceX internal documents show that the company uses a net operating loss carryforward mechanism, a provision of US tax law that allows past losses to be taken into account to reduce future taxable income.
According to the documents, by the end of 2021, SpaceX had accumulated almost $5.4 billion in tax losses. This effectively makes it possible to avoid paying federal taxes on the same amount of future profits. This provision is available to any company, and in 2017, the Donald Trump administration canceled its expiration date. According to The Times, this means that SpaceX can now indefinitely apply about $3 billion of past losses to future profits.
The journalists reached out to SpaceX for comment, but the company did not respond.
Despite the controversy over tax policy, SpaceX’s business is growing rapidly and thriving. By estimates Payload, in 2023, the company received about $8.7 billion in revenue, in 2024 — already $13.1 billion, and in 2025 it is expected to reach more than $15.5 billion. Musk himself in June said on the social network X that SpaceX’s commercial revenues will exceed NASA’s annual budget next year. The space agency’s budget for the next fiscal year could be reduced by 25%. Meanwhile, SpaceX is thriving and even building own city with a «gold» Elon Musk statue.
SpaceX is one of several multibillion-dollar tech companies that brought Musk to the world stage and made him the richest man in the world. And this explosive growth is driven not only by private customers, but also by government contracts to a large extent.
By data According to The Washington Post, since the 2000s, Musk and his companies have received at least $38 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax breaks. In addition, 52 more active agreements with NASA, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies could bring Musk’s business an additional $11.8 billion in the coming years.
Documents reviewed by The New York Times show that in 2020, 84% of SpaceX’s revenue came from federal contracts, and in 2021, —76%. This means that the company, which receives the lion’s share of its revenues from government projects, actually avoids significant tax payments back to the budget.
Experts note that avoiding paying more than $5 billion in federal taxes is a huge benefit for a company that is so heavily dependent on government contracts. This situation creates a kind of paradox: the government finances SpaceX’s development, but receives relatively little in the form of tax revenues.
Nevertheless, SpaceX has now become such an important part of the American space economy and national security system that no radical changes in this cooperation are expected.
Source: gizmodo
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