DicariaFour companies say they supply SpaceX. The other 53 mention it for other reasons.
SpaceX files nothing with the SEC, so its purchasing is invisible by construction. But every US-listed company that mentions it in an annual report is visible. Fifty-seven do. Four are describing a sale to SpaceX. The rest are describing something else entirely — and to a keyword search, all 57 look the same.
Four name SpaceX as a customer: RBC Bearings, Graham Corp, Sidus Space and, in a narrower sense, Velo3D — which licensed patents rather than supplying hardware. None discloses how much SpaceX buys. Of the other 53, seven are buying from SpaceX, a dozen compete with it, six hold it as an investment, and the remainder mention it as a landlord, a corporate-structure note, a line on someone’s CV, or not meaningfully at all. The hard part was never finding the 57. It was refusing to call them suppliers.
1 · The four
| Company | What it makes | What the filing says | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| RBC Bearings (RBC) | Bearings and engineered components | “Our largest Aerospace & Defense customers include the DOD, Boeing, Airbus, Newport News Shipbuilding, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Blue Origin and SpaceX…” | Named as a top customer |
| Graham Corp (GHM) | Heat exchangers, vacuum and cryogenic equipment | Customer list: “…NASA, Newport News Shipbuilding, Northrop Grumman, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Radiant Nuclear, Raytheon Technologies, Relativity, Rolls-Royce North America, SAIC, SES, Sierra Space, SpaceX, U.S. Navy, and United Launch Alliance.” | Named in customer list |
| Sidus Space (SIDU) | Small-satellite hardware and services | “Our success is built on more than a decade of experience delivering flight-proven systems, platforms, devices, and hardware for customers such as NASA, the Department of Defense (DoD), SpaceX, and Blue Origin.” | Named in customer list |
| Velo3D (VELO) | Metal additive manufacturing | “a licensing agreement with SpaceX in September 2024, where SpaceX obtained a non-exclusive license to certain Velo3D patents and technologies for its internal uses only” — $5.0M in 2024. | IP licence, not hardware |
All four stop at the same place: a name on a list. Not one gives a dollar figure attributable to SpaceX or a share of revenue. That is the ceiling of what a customer disclosure will tell you — and it is why we treat “named as a customer” as a grade, not a conclusion.
2 · What the other 53 are actually saying
This is the part a keyword search cannot do for you. The same string appears in six different grammatical roles, and only one of them is supply — pointing the wrong way.
| What the sentence does | Examples | Why it poisons a supply map |
|---|---|---|
| Buys from SpaceX | Globalstar (launch agreements 2023, 2024, 2025); DISH (launch services); Royal Caribbean (“entire fleet is equipped with Starlink”); Firefly, York, Momentus, Terran Orbital | The arrow is reversed — these are SpaceX customers, not suppliers |
| Competes with SpaceX | Boeing (“BDS faces strong competition … and SpaceX”); Rocket Lab; AST SpaceMobile; KVH; Gogo; Iridium; Viasat; Intuitive Machines | Competitor lists read exactly like customer lists at 20 paces |
| Holds SpaceX as an investment | XMax; BRC Group; Tailwind 2.0; Northern Revival; Collab Z; Project Energy Reimagined | A fund position is a financial link, not a commercial one |
| Rents to SpaceX | Ares Real Estate Income Trust — SpaceX appears in its tenant table with leased area and share of rent | A lease is a real relationship and not a supply relationship |
| Notes a corporate-structure fact | Tesla — xAI Holdings “later became a subsidiary of SpaceX in February 2026” | Ownership tells you nothing about procurement |
| Appears on a CV or in local colour | SURF AIR (former SpaceX general counsel); IX Acquisition (former production executive); AERWINS (SpaceX’s Hawthorne facility as a nearby employer) | People and geography are not transactions |
Read the first row again: seven companies in this set buy launches or connectivity from SpaceX. That is a supply relationship in the opposite direction, and it is the most concrete thing in the whole dataset — Globalstar alone describes launch services agreements signed in August 2023, October 2024 and June 2025.
Each bucket has exactly one test: supply lands in a customer list or a revenue note, tenancy shows up in a lease schedule, competition shows up in a risk paragraph.
3 · Three sentences that will make you wrong
Graham’s 10% customers. Same filing: two customers each exceeded 10% of revenue in fiscal 2026; SpaceX appears in a customer list. Two statements, no link. The moment you connect them, you have invented a concentration figure.
Velo3D’s “customer”. The filing calls it a licensing agreement and says the rights were for internal use. A reader in a hurry writes “Velo3D supplies SpaceX’s 3D printers”. The filing does not say that, and the $5.0 million is licence revenue.
Ares’s tenant table. SpaceX appears with a leased-area figure and a share of rent. It is a genuine disclosure, in a genuine filing, that has nothing to do with the supply chain.
4 · Why the real number is small
SpaceX does not file, so the buying side is absent from the disclosure system. A supplier only surfaces when two conditions meet: it is SEC-registered, and SpaceX is material enough that naming it is worth the space. Much of the chain — precision machining, composites, additive services, test houses — is privately held and will never appear anywhere.
The four names are not SpaceX’s supplier list. They are the intersection of that supply chain with the disclosure system, and the intersection is thin by design.
5 · What we actually deliver
Not a search result. A classification, with the reasoning left visible:
- every mentioning company sorted into supply / purchase / competition / investment / tenancy / irrelevant;
- the verbatim passage and the filing it came from, for each one;
- an evidence grade — named as a customer, disclosed with an amount, or merely mentioned;
- and an exclusion list: which companies were dropped, and on what sentence.
The last item is the one most vendors omit, and the one your auditor will ask for. A list of four suppliers is easy to produce. A list of four suppliers, plus 53 documented reasons why the other companies are not suppliers, is a file you can defend.
FAQ
Why not just search EDGAR yourself?
How did you decide a company is a supplier?
Is Graham one of the companies where SpaceX exceeds 10% of revenue?
Does Velo3D count as a supplier?
What about companies outside the US?
Can you do this for a different company?
- 57 US-listed companies whose most recent annual report contains the string “SpaceX” (112 filings in total since 2024; deduplicated by CIK). Each was read in full context, not scored by keyword.
- Not covered: 20-F filings (would raise the count to 142), quarterly reports (235), private suppliers, and any statement by SpaceX itself. A company’s absence here says nothing about whether it supplies SpaceX.
- Evidence grades: “named as a customer” requires a customer-list or revenue-note context. Anything weaker is recorded as inference and excluded from the count of four.
Disclosure passages, their source and entity matching are queryable today; the six-bucket test is the one in this article, and running it inside your own agent outlasts any one-off list. Automated classification of company relationships is still in build.
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