Elon Musk said SpaceX is “aiming for 1TW/year from Earth, rising to over 1PW/year from the Moon”, in a post on X at 19:05 UTC on 11 November. He was replying to a post about SpaceX’s order of solar manufacturing equipment from the German supplier Singulus.
By our arithmetic, 1 TW a year is 10 times the “100 GW/year of HJT solar manufacturing equipment” that Musk posted on 10 November SpaceX had ordered from Singulus, and about 23 times the solar capacity the US installed in 2025.
The full post reads: “Actually, we’re aiming for 1TW/year from Earth, rising to over 1PW/year from the Moon.” It goes on: “That’s why I say that if we achieve this outcome, SpaceX will obviously be worth more than Earth, because space is so staggeringly enormous!” The valuation line is Musk’s own view, and he makes it conditional on reaching the goal.
Musk’s post names the units but not what is being counted. The post he replied to, from the account @IterIntellectus, was about “100 GW of solar capacity every year” and quoted Musk’s 10 November post on the Singulus order, which says the equipment is “for Starmind to create a sentient sun”. A petawatt is 1,000 terawatts, so the Moon goal is 1,000 times the Earth goal, by our arithmetic.
Musk’s stated goals against the Singulus order he posted, US solar installs in 2025 and data-centre power use. The ratios and the 47 GW average draw are our arithmetic.
Business Pill · Vertical Integration
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on vertical integration and stacked margins. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss SpaceX or Singulus.
The key insight: As we read it, Musk has put a number on the gap between the order SpaceX has placed and the scale he says it wants: 100 GW a year of equipment ordered from Singulus, by his account, against a goal of 1 TW a year from Earth, 10 times as much by our arithmetic. Only the first Singulus line, due in the first half of 2027, is priced in the documents we read.
What Was Posted on X
@IterIntellectus Actually, we’re aiming for 1TW/year from Earth, rising to over 1PW/year from the Moon.
That’s why I say that if we achieve this outcome, SpaceX will obviously be worth more than Earth, because space is so staggeringly enormous!
Elon Musk’s reply at 19:05 UTC on 11 November says SpaceX is aiming for 1TW/year from Earth, rising to over 1PW/year from the Moon, and that if it achieves this, SpaceX will be worth more than Earth. This piece quotes it in full and compares the 1 TW goal with the Singulus order, US solar installs and data-centre power use.
do you realize how insane this is?
100 GW of solar capacity every year.
at continuous full output, one year’s production could generate a fifth of all the electricity the US uses annually.
ten years at that rate would mean 1 TW of capacity. SpaceX could generate roughly twice the current annual electricity consumption of the largest superpower in the world in just a decade.
The post Musk replied to, from @IterIntellectus at 13:47 UTC, quotes Musk’s 10 November Singulus post and works out that ten years at 100 GW a year would mean 1 TW of capacity. Its electricity comparisons are the account’s own and are not used as facts here.
From 100 GW to a Terawatt
Singulus’s own wording is narrower. Its nine-month results release says the first line it is building for SpaceX “has an order volume of over € 60 million” and that “production will scale to support more than 100 GW of production equipment as SpaceX accelerates satellite manufacturing in Bastrop, Texas”. We covered that release in Singulus Prices SpaceX’s First Solar Line Above €60 Million.
The release says the first line “will be delivered in the first half of 2027”. When the contract was announced, SpaceX’s Mike Nicolls tied the cells to its satellites: “Partnering with SINGULUS gives us a high-performance manufacturing path for solar cells for our Starmind satellites at our production facility in Texas”, as we reported in SpaceX Orders Solar Cell Line From €48M-Revenue Singulus.
The Scale, Against the Ground
The US solar industry “installed 43.1 gigawatts-direct current (GWdc) of capacity in 2025”, according to SEIA and Wood Mackenzie. A terawatt a year is about 23 times that, by our arithmetic.
The IEA’s Energy and AI report says “Data centres accounted for around 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024, or 415 terawatt-hours (TWh).” Spread over the 8,760 hours of a year, that is an average draw of about 47 GW, so 1 TW is about 21 times it, by our arithmetic. The IEA said in April that electricity demand from data centres “soared by 17% in 2025”.
These are scale markers, not equivalents. A solar rating is peak output, while the IEA figure is energy used across a year, and Musk’s numbers are goals, not output.
Not everyone shares the orbital timeline. Alex Heath wrote that AWS chief executive Matt Garman “thinks the economics and practical challenges will keep that prospect out of reach for another decade or two”, as we reported in AWS Adds a GPU Every 14 Seconds.
The Structural Read
As we read the two posts together, the terawatt goal answers a fan’s ten-year extrapolation of the Singulus order with a single year: @IterIntellectus wrote that ten years at 100 GW a year would mean 1 TW of capacity, and Musk replied that SpaceX is aiming for 1TW/year.
As we read the scale markers, 1 TW a year is about 23 times US solar installs in 2025 and about 21 times the average draw of all data centres in 2024, by our arithmetic, with peak ratings set against average use.
“That’s why I say that if we achieve this outcome, SpaceX will obviously be worth more than Earth, because space is so staggeringly enormous!”
Three Implications
FOR SPACEX Musk’s post sets a goal of 1TW/year from Earth and over 1PW/year from the Moon, with no date, cost or site attached.
FOR SINGULUS Its release prices the first SpaceX line at over €60 million and says production will scale to support more than 100 GW of production equipment, with no period given.
FOR THE POWER DEBATE The IEA put data centres at around 1.5% of world electricity use in 2024, or 415 TWh, and said their demand soared by 17% in 2025.
The framework says: “The structural bottleneck isn’t computing, it’s electrons.”
As we read it, Musk’s terawatt goal is a claim about the electron side of that bottleneck, made in solar manufacturing units rather than chips. The framework predates the post and does not discuss it.
What Is Not Established
Musk’s post gives no date, cost or site for either goal, and does not say whether a terawatt a year means cells made, panels launched or power generated. We did not find either goal in the Singulus release or the other documents we read.
Musk’s 100 GW a year and Singulus’s more than 100 GW of production equipment are worded differently, and Singulus gives no period for its figure. We did not contact SpaceX or Singulus for this piece.
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Musk says SpaceX is aiming for 1 TW a year from Earth and over 1 PW a year from the Moon. By our arithmetic the Earth goal is 10 times the 100 GW a year he said SpaceX ordered from Singulus a day earlier, and about 23 times US solar installs in 2025.
A note on sourcing. We read Elon Musk’s 11 November post on X and the post it replies to in full, and his 10 November post on the Singulus order. The Singulus wording is from its 11 November nine-month results release, the US installation figure from SEIA and Wood Mackenzie’s 2025 review, and the data-centre figures from the IEA’s Energy and AI report and its 16 April 2026 release. The ratios and the 47 GW average draw are our arithmetic. We did not contact SpaceX or Singulus for this piece.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
