Elon Musk Creates Confusion over Anthropic Deal Terms Ahead of SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk has created uncertainty among potential investors after posting details about SpaceX’s partnership with Anthropic on social media that appear to contradict information in the company’s IPO filing.

CNBC reports that SpaceX filed for an initial public offering one week ago, but CEO Elon Musk is already generating confusion among investors by sharing information on social media that diverges from the company’s official IPO prospectus. The discrepancy concerns a significant deal between SpaceX and artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, raising questions about the accuracy of financial disclosures as the space and AI giant prepares to go public in what would be a record-breaking offering.

Earlier this month, SpaceX announced it would lease unused computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee to Anthropic. According to the company’s 300-plus page IPO prospectus filed last week, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping up in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. The filing also stated that either party could terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice.

However, in a post on social network X this week, Musk provided different details about the arrangement. “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years,” Musk wrote, describing the agreement as a “180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter.” Notably, the IPO prospectus made no mention of the deal potentially ending after just a few months.

The distinction between these two versions of the agreement represents a significant factor for prospective investors attempting to value the company. If Anthropic pays SpaceX $15 billion annually for three years as the prospectus suggests, that would represent a substantial portion of SpaceX’s total revenue, which reached $18.7 billion in 2025. A much shorter-term arrangement would provide considerably less financial benefit. The compute capacity lease also represents an entirely new revenue stream for SpaceX, placing the company in competition with neocloud providers such as Nebius and CoreWeave.

Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on corporate governance, highlighted the discrepancy. “The odd thing is that either Musk is correct and the S-1 is materially misleading, or the S-1 is correct and Elon is up to his old hijinx,” Talley said. “But more than that it’s confusing to investors who are trying (best they can) to put a valuation on SpaceX.”

The confusion comes at a challenging time for SpaceX, as some investors are already hesitant about participating in the largest IPO on record for a company valued at over $1 trillion that continues to burn billions of dollars quarterly.

The Anthropic deal disclosure is not the only area where analysts have identified gaps in SpaceX’s IPO filing. Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, documented multiple omissions in a report following the publication of the prospectus. “Critical disclosures are missing,” Granda wrote, pointing to absent information about subscriber churn, unit economics for the Falcon 9 partially reusable rocket, and AI segment granularity. The company did not break out subscriptions to Grok or X or provide details on utilization rates for its deployed computing capacity.

The AI component of SpaceX presents particular valuation challenges for investors. Musk founded xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI in the generative AI market. In February, Musk valued xAI at $250 billion when he merged it with SpaceX, creating a combined entity valued at $1.25 trillion. During the first quarter of this year, SpaceX’s capital expenditures totaled $10.1 billion, more than double the amount from a year earlier, with $7.7 billion tied to xAI. The AI unit, now known as SpaceXAI, recorded a $2.5 billion operating loss during the quarter.

By leasing computing capacity to Anthropic, SpaceX effectively acknowledged that its own AI models and services have not generated sufficient demand to fully utilize its expensive infrastructure. In his Wednesday night post, Musk explained that SpaceX wanted the flexibility to terminate the deal if it needs the capacity for its own operations. “We won’t leave them hanging and will provide a reasonable off-ramp,” Musk wrote, referring to Anthropic. “But if compute gets super tight I said we might need it back at some point.”

Some analysts view the Anthropic deal positively. Cathie Wood of Ark Invest, a SpaceX supporter, praised Musk’s decision to monetize the computing infrastructure that cost xAI billions of dollars to build. “Thanks to its deal with Anthropic, XAI, now SpaceXAI, is pivoting from massive losses at Colossus to significant profitability as a neocloud,” Wood wrote after the deal was announced on May 9. She estimated the move would generate $5 billion to $6 billion in annual revenue.

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