SpaceX's first-ever earnings show higher revenues and huge spending
BBC ● Covered by 5 sources
SpaceX's first-ever earnings as a public company showed revenue nearly doubled but spending exploded even faster, leading to a $2bn loss. Stock dropped nearly 9% after hours, even as Musk insists people are underestimating the company.
Based on reporting by BBC — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
SpaceX just posted its first quarterly report since going public in June, and the numbers tell two very different stories depending on which line you read. Revenue climbed 92% to $7.8bn compared with a year earlier. But spending jumped more than 550% to $18.3bn, and the company posted a $2bn net loss over the first six months of the year. The stock fell nearly 9% in after-hours trading despite Elon Musk telling analysts that people seem to be "underestimating" the company.
Starlink is the one bright spot, at least on paper. It's currently the only part of SpaceX turning a profit, bringing in $1.6bn during the quarter. Musk expects that business to grow exponentially, going so far as to suggest Starlink could eventually operate most of the world's internet. Meanwhile SpaceX's core rocket business, the thing it was actually built to do, lost $542m against $962m in revenue for the quarter.
The real story, though, is AI. SpaceX is now selling compute power to companies including Google and Anthropic, and Musk says the 1.4 gigawatts of capacity it has ready today should hit at least 10 gigawatts sometime next year through new data centre builds. He even said, on the call, that data centres are a "trivial problem" compared to building reusable rockets. That business lost $1.2bn on $2.5bn in revenue this quarter, and finance chief Bret Johnson said capital spending would stay at a similar level through the rest of the year.
Musk, never short on ambition, now expects SpaceX to hit $1tn in revenue by 2030, a year sooner than he was saying just six weeks ago. Investors didn't share the enthusiasm; shares fell more than 7% after hours, wiping out the day's gains. Analyst Matt Britzman put it plainly: SpaceX could soon look like an AI infrastructure company with an extraordinary space business attached, and the near-term financial engine will increasingly be AI rather than rockets.
Not everyone is convinced the whole company deserves Musk's underestimated framing. Brady Wang from Counterpoint Research noted Starlink's subscription numbers look strong, but it's still the only unit with an operating profit. Fabien Yip at IG called it a stretch to say the whole business is undervalued while the AI unit keeps losing money. And SpaceX shares have been drifting down since hitting $176 in June, trading below their $135 debut price for weeks now, even after briefly topping the market value of giants like Microsoft and Amazon.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Musk calling this underestimation while the core rocket business bleeds money and AI loses more than a billion in a single quarter is a stretch, and analysts are right to push back on it. Starlink is genuinely working, which is the part investors should actually care about, not the sprawling promise of a trillion-dollar AI pivot by 2030. Every big tech player is currently torching cash on AI infrastructure, sure, but that's not a reason to wave off the losses, it's a reason to watch the spending closely.
Read more about this at: BBC