SpaceX has filed its first quarterly report as a public company, and the numbers pull hard in both directions. Revenue almost doubled. Spending went up far faster.
The Elon Musk company builds rockets and Starlink internet satellites and owns the social media platform X. It listed on the US stock market in June.
Revenue for the quarter came in at $7.8bn (£5.8bn), a 92% increase on the same period a year earlier. Against that, costs rose by more than 550% to $18.3bn, and the company recorded a $2bn net loss across the first six months of the year.
Investors did not like it. The stock dropped in after-hours trading, erasing the gains it had made during Tuesday’s session.
Musk’s case for patience
On the call with analysts and investors, Musk argued that people are underestimating the company.
His evidence is Starlink, the only division currently turning a profit, which brought in $1.6bn in the second quarter. He expects that growth curve to steepen considerably from here.
“It’s not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will operate most of the world’s internet,” Musk said.
He also talked up a newer line of business: selling the compute capacity that AI projects require. Google and Anthropic are among the current customers. SpaceX has 1.4 gigawatts available now, and Musk said the data centre build-out should push that to at least 10 gigawatts at some point next year.
He was dismissive about the difficulty involved, telling the call that data centres are a trivial problem next to building reusable rockets.
Where the money is going out
Rockets remain the core business and they are not paying for themselves yet. The space segment recorded a $542m net loss on revenue of $962m for the quarter.
The AI business is deeper in the red, losing $1.2bn on revenue of $2.5bn.
Bret Johnson, head of finance, told the call that capital spending will run at a very similar level through the rest of the year.
That did not stop Musk making a bigger claim than he was making six weeks ago: he now expects SpaceX to reach $1tn in revenue by 2030, a year earlier than his previous estimate.
A listing that has lost its shine
SpaceX went public in the largest listing on record and briefly carried a higher total valuation than Microsoft and Amazon. Holding onto that enthusiasm has proved harder.
The share price has drifted down since hitting $176 on its opening day in June, and for the past several weeks it has been trading below the $135 debut price.
