• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 28, 2026

If you think Elon Musk's SpaceX was only about rockets and premium satellite communications for a niche audience, you haven't tuned in.

SpaceX's initially public stock market filing shows the focus more than anything is about how the company will be the parent company for many things -- X, Grok, Starlink -- with a major focus on advertising.

SpaceX touts that its total addressable market (TAM) for advertising is $600 billion.

From that angle, it means evolving more of its business into other areas -- including social media, Musk’s AI large language model (LLM) Grok, platforms, and video. Of all types.

Think Walt Disney, YouTube, Netflix, Comcast, Charter -- especially with regard to artificial intelligence (AI)-connected video content.

Analysts believe video is likely to be a major part of this.

Musk even posted a comment when Open AI (a competitor to Musk's Grok) abandoned its Sora video creation platform a while back that this signaled an opportunity for his businesses.

With regard to social media app X, the filing describes new products and features that would grow to become the "everything app," with the goal to work on increasing “long-form video, audio, and video calling,” among other areas.

Right now, the focus is the performance of existing business -- especially past results.

X's annual advertising revenue has declined since Musk took over ownership of the company -- slipping from $4.5 billion in 2021 to $2.3 billion in 2023 and  $1.73 billion in 2024, although X's revenue did tick up to $1.84 billion in 2025.

The sharp decline came after Musk took the Twitter-named social-media site private.

The company's ad revenue was also impacted by Musk's outspoken comments about advertisers -- and in particular, Hollywood studios after some offensive social media posts from Musk.

So Musk thinks things have stabilized somewhat. And that means opportunities for all sorts of business -- including the expansion of Starlink, his satellite-delivered internet service.

This means targeting fiber-based home broadband internet businesses, which are already suffering. This would mean competition with weakening broadband businesses at big names like Comcast, Charter, AT&T and T-Mobile, among others.

Overall, we wonder how the market will respond long term -- as SpaceX blue-skies its future when it comes not only to space, but AI, interconnectivity, and even the media.

If investors buy in, does that in turn mean that brand advertisers -- along with whatever “brand-safety” concerns they have in relation to X and other areas-- would be far behind?

Eyeing a $600 billion global “digital” advertising market may offer a hint.