SpaceX's first-ever earnings show higher revenues and huge spending

SpaceX finally opened its books, and the numbers tell two very different stories at once. Revenue climbed 92% year-on-year to $7.8bn in the first half of 2025, a genuinely impressive figure for any company. Spending, though, rose more than 550% to $18.3bn over the same stretch, and the combined effect was a $2bn net loss. Investors did not love it. Shares fell nearly 9% in after-hours trading, then dropped a further 7% the next day, erasing whatever optimism had built up beforehand.

Elon Musk spent the earnings call insisting the market has it backwards, that people are "underestimating" what SpaceX has become. His evidence: Starlink, the satellite internet arm, which is the only unit actually turning a profit, pulling in $1.6bn in the second quarter alone. Musk went further, predicting Starlink could eventually carry most of the world's internet traffic. Big claim. But half the planet still lacks decent broadband because laying cable to remote regions never made economic sense, so a satellite network sidestepping that problem entirely is not a crazy pitch.

The bigger swing factor is AI infrastructure, a business SpaceX barely had a year ago. It already rents out 1.4 gigawatts of compute to customers including Google and Anthropic, and Musk expects that to jump to at least 10 gigawatts by next year through new data centre builds. He even claimed data centres are "trivial" compared with building reusable rockets, which is a bold thing to say about a segment that just lost $1.2bn on $2.5bn in revenue. Rockets themselves aren't doing much better financially, posting a $542m loss against $962m in revenue for the quarter.

So the company right now looks less like a rocket maker with a side hustle and more like an AI infrastructure bet wrapped around a space business, at least according to analysts like Matt Britzman at Hargreaves Lansdown. Musk, meanwhile, has moved his own timeline up, now saying SpaceX could hit $1tn in revenue by 2030, a year earlier than he was saying just six weeks ago. Whether the market believes him is a separate question. Shares have been sliding pretty much since their June debut high of $176, and have spent weeks trading below the original $135 listing price.

Analysts are split on how much slack to cut Musk here. Brady Wang at Counterpoint called Starlink's subscriber growth genuinely strong, but noted it is still the lone profitable piece of the puzzle. Fabien Yip at IG went further, calling it a stretch to say the whole company is underestimated while the AI arm keeps burning cash. And Wendy Souvannarath of Carré Partners, an actual SpaceX investor, argued every major tech firm is spending recklessly on AI right now and that SpaceX is simply treating it as a cost of doing business it expects to recoup within a year. Musk's politics remain, in Yip's phrase, a "live risk" hanging over all of it regardless.