The story behind the cartoon
SpaceX's third-quarter filing disclosed a single unnamed customer — listed only as "Customer B" — accounting for 34.5% of quarterly revenue for its AI division, now called Super Intelligence. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the customer is Anthropic, citing a person familiar with the matter, and that the AI lab has overtaken the United States government as SpaceX's largest single customer. Neither company confirmed the identity on the record; the filing itself names no one.
The money trail runs through Anthropic's own IPO filing, submitted October 26: compute agreements with SpaceXAI worth up to $120.5 billion through 2029, paying roughly $3.1 billion a month at full run rate from December 2026 for NVIDIA GPU capacity at SpaceX's Memphis data centers, including the Colossus supercomputers. SpaceX's total third-quarter revenue was $14.58 billion, putting a single customer's share at roughly $5 billion for the quarter, and its AI division turned profitable for the first time.
The concentration cuts both ways. SpaceX is increasingly bankrolled by AI infrastructure contracts, and Anthropic's deals can be cancelled by either side on 90 days' notice after January and March 2027 — a $3.1-billion-a-month revenue stream that could walk away just as financing conditions tighten for companies renting out computing capacity. Google, by comparison, pays SpaceX about $920 million a month for compute. The rocket company's biggest customer is now a tenant, not a government.
The joke in Zimbo's cartoon is the changing of the guard at the launch pad: a big, grinning robot hands SpaceX's launch crew an oversized check marked CUSTOMER B while Uncle Sam stands to the side clutching a much smaller one, looking like a man who just found out he is no longer the favorite. The rocket waits on the pad behind them, paid for — reportedly — by the chatbot company.
THE ORIGINAL THINKER
THE PROOF CAME WITH BUGS.
THE KEY UNDER THE MAT.
THE SIDE DOOR