How SpaceX avoids paying taxes

By Caleb Ecarma, Aug 22, 2025

Despite receiving billions of dollars in federal contracts and subsidies, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company, has reportedly taken advantage of a benefit from President Trump’s first term to avoid paying income taxes.

But SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The rocket maker’s finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by The Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income.

President Trump made a change in 2017, during his first term, that eliminated the tax benefit’s expiration date for all companies. For SpaceX, that means that nearly $3 billion of its losses can be indefinitely applied against future taxable income.

In other SpaceX news:

• On Thursday evening, SpaceX used a Falcon 9 rocket to successfully launch a U.S. Space Force X-37B, an uncrewed rocket plane used for classified missions.
• In June, SpaceX reassigned about 20% of the Falcon 9 engineering team to a six-month stint working on Starship, according to Bloomberg. The changeover was made after a Starship vehicle exploded during a routine test, marking a fourth consecutive failure for SpaceX’s largest and most expensive rocket. The next Starship test launch is scheduled for Sunday at 7:30 p.m. EDT.

• SpaceX is demanding more funding from Louisiana’s $499 million share of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, a federal infrastructure initiative that seeks to improve broadband access in rural America. Louisiana allocated just $7.7 million to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet, with the vast majority of its BEAD funding going to the development of wired, fiber connections. While satellite internet has low upfront costs, fiber infrastructure is faster, more reliable, and offers users cheaper subscription fees.
• Starlink suffered a network outage on Monday for the second time in as many weeks.
• Starlink users must now pay a $5 monthly fee to pause their subscription, ending a policy that allowed intermittent users to activate and deactivate the service at will. The new “Standby Mode” comes with “unlimited low-speed data” capped at 500Kbps. Users can still cancel their Starlink subscription rather than pay the $5. However, they may be unable to reactivate or use it in the future, due to local capacity limits and exorbitant demand fees.

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