SpaceX Stock price
Compare with Peer Group
📊 Peer Group
📈 What is it?
The peer group consists of the companies with the most similar business model. They serve as a benchmark for putting a stock into context.
🧮 How is it selected?
Based on similarity of business model, meaning companies from the same industry with comparable products and a similar customer base. That's the only way to compare apples to apples.
🏛️ Why does it matter?
Whether a stock is cheap or expensive is best judged by comparison. A P/E of 18 or an EV/FCF of 20 can look cheap or expensive depending on the yardstick. The peer group gives you the most accurate one: companies with a similar business model that operate under the same conditions.
🎯 What does it mean for investors?
When a metric sits below the peer average, the stock is valued more cheaply relative to its competitors, and above the average more expensively. A discount to the peer group can be an opportunity, but it can also have a reason (for example lower growth). The comparison is a starting point, not a verdict.
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Key metrics
📘 Market Capitalization
📈 What is it?
Market capitalization shows how much a company is currently worth on the stock market.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps classify companies by size (Large, Mid, Small Cap) and indicates their market presence and relative stability.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Large-cap companies tend to be more stable, often pay dividends, but may grow more slowly.
- Smaller firms may offer higher growth potential but come with more volatility.
- Market capitalization is a useful indicator of company size — but not a measure of whether a stock is undervalued or overvalued.
📘 Enterprise Value (EV)
📈 What is it?
Enterprise Value represents the total cost to acquire a company — including its debt and excluding its cash reserves.
🧮 How is it calculated?
(= Market Cap + Net Debt)
🏛️ Why is it important?
EV gives a more complete picture of a company's value than market cap alone and is used in key valuation ratios like EV/FCF or EV/Sales.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Enterprise Value shows the true cost of buying a company, including all financial obligations.
- It is more accurate than just looking at market cap, especially when comparing companies with different levels of debt or cash.
- Professional investors prefer EV-based multiples because they better reflect the company’s full financial footprint.
📘 Net Debt
📈 What is it?
Net Debt shows how much debt remains after subtracting a company’s available cash reserves.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It indicates how dependent a company is on borrowed money and how easily it can service its debt in the short term.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Low or negative net debt signals financial strength and flexibility.
- Companies with strong cash positions are better positioned in crises.
- High net debt increases financial risk — especially in environments with rising interest rates or economic downturns.
📘 Cash
📈 What is it?
Cash represents all liquid assets a company can access immediately — including cash, bank deposits, and short-term investments.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It reflects a company’s financial flexibility and resilience — enabling investments, buybacks, or buffer in downturns.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A strong cash position means greater room for maneuver and crisis resistance.
- Cash-rich companies can invest, pay down debt, or repurchase shares.
- But excess idle cash might indicate a lack of growth opportunities.
📘 Shares Outstanding
📈 What is it?
Shares outstanding represent the total number of a company’s shares currently held by investors — excluding treasury stock.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It’s the basis for key metrics like Earnings Per Share (EPS), Market Capitalization, or the Price/Earnings ratio (P/E).
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Fewer shares in circulation typically increase earnings per share — making each share more valuable.
- Share buybacks reduce the number of shares and boost per-share metrics.
- Issuing new shares does the opposite — diluting shareholder value and lowering per-share figures.
📘 Price-to-Earnings Ratio (P/E)
📈 What is it?
The P/E ratio shows how many times a company's earnings per share are reflected in its current share price — in other words, how "expensive" the stock appears relative to its profits.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The P/E ratio is one of the most widely used valuation metrics. It helps investors assess whether a stock appears cheap or expensive compared to its earnings power.
🧮 Calculation
📊 P/E (TTM) = Based on earnings from the last 12 months (Trailing Twelve Months):🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low P/E may indicate undervaluation — or signal underlying issues.
- A high P/E may reflect strong growth expectations — or an overvalued stock.
📘 Price-to-Sales Ratio (P/S)
📈 What is it?
The P/S ratio shows how much investors are paying for $1 of the company’s revenue – regardless of profitability.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
P/S is especially useful for evaluating growth companies or businesses not yet profitable. It reflects how the market values the company’s sales.
🧮 Calculation
Market Cap = $2.01t | Revenue (TTM) = $31.18b
Market Cap = $2.01t | Estimated Revenue = $45.73b
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low P/S may indicate undervaluation — or low profitability.
- A high P/S can reflect strong growth expectations — or excessive optimism.
- Especially helpful when evaluating companies where profits are low, volatile, or negative.
📘 Enterprise Value to Sales (EV/Sales)
📈 What is it?
EV/Sales shows how much investors are paying for $1 of revenue — considering not just equity, but also debt and cash. It’s the capital structure–adjusted version of the P/S ratio.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It’s ideal for comparing companies with different levels of debt. It reflects a company's true cost relative to its revenue.
🧮 Calculation
Enterprise Value = $1.95t | Revenue (TTM) = $31.18b
Enterprise Value = $1.95t | Forward Revenue = $45.73b
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- EV/Sales allows for capital structure–neutral company comparisons.
- A lower ratio may indicate undervaluation; a higher one may signal strong growth expectations or overvaluation.
- Especially helpful when evaluating high-growth companies with low or negative earnings.
📘 Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow (EV/FCF)
📈 What is it?
EV/FCF shows how many years it would take for a company to "pay back" its enterprise value using its free cash flow.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It focuses on real cash generation, ignoring accounting noise — ideal for assessing profitability and value based on liquidity, not earnings.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low EV/FCF may signal undervaluation and strong cash generation.
- A high EV/FCF might reflect weak recent cash flow or aggressive growth expectations.
- Best suited for stable, mature businesses with predictable free cash flows.
📘 Price-to-Book Ratio (P/B)
📈 What is it?
The P/B ratio compares a company’s market value to its book value — showing how much investors are paying for each dollar of net assets.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
P/B is commonly used for asset-heavy industries like banks or industrials. It helps assess whether a stock is trading above or below its net asset value.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A P/B below 1 may signal undervaluation — or weak profitability.
- A P/B above 1 implies the market expects future value creation (e.g., brand, IP, growth).
- Best used for companies with tangible assets and strong balance sheets.
📘 Equity Ratio
📈 What is it?
The equity ratio indicates what portion of a company’s total assets is financed by shareholders’ equity – in other words, how much it relies on its own capital.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
A high equity ratio reflects financial strength and stability, especially during downturns. It’s a key indicator of a company’s solvency and long-term risk profile.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Companies with high equity ratios are generally more resilient and less dependent on external debt.
- Low equity ratios can signal higher risk or aggressive financial strategies.
- Important: Always assess the equity ratio in combination with the return on equity (ROE). This shows not just how stable the company is – but also how efficiently it uses shareholder capital.
📘 Return on Equity (ROE)
📈 What is it?
Return on equity (ROE) shows how efficiently a company uses its shareholders’ equity to generate profit. In other words: how much net income is earned per dollar of equity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROE is a core profitability metric. It helps investors understand whether a company delivers attractive returns on the capital provided by its shareholders.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROE indicates that the company is using its capital efficiently and profitably.
- It’s especially meaningful for capital-intensive businesses or firms with high equity bases.
- Important: A very high ROE can also result from high debt levels – always interpret it alongside the equity ratio to assess financial health.
📘 Return on Capital Employed (ROCE)
📈 What is it?
ROCE measures how efficiently a company generates profits from its total capital – including both equity and interest-bearing debt.
🧮 How is it calculated?
It evaluates the return on all capital employed, regardless of how it’s financed.
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROCE is ideal for comparing companies with different financing structures. It shows how well management uses capital to create value for both shareholders and creditors.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROCE means the company uses its capital efficiently – regardless of whether it's funded by debt or equity.
- The higher the ROCE compared to peers, the more value the company creates with its invested capital.
- Especially relevant for capital-intensive sectors like industrials, energy, or infrastructure.
📘 Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
📈 What is it?
ROIC measures how efficiently a company generates returns from the capital invested in its core operations – regardless of whether the capital comes from equity or debt.
🧮 How is it calculated?
- NOPAT = Net Operating Profit After Taxes
- Invested Capital = Operating assets minus non-interest-bearing liabilities
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROIC is one of the most accurate indicators of capital efficiency. Unlike return on equity, it is not distorted by leverage and shows how much value is created for all capital providers.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROIC shows how effectively a company uses the capital that is truly invested in its core operations.
- Unlike ROCE, ROIC focuses only on the capital that is actively used to run the business – and that requires a return (i.e. interest-bearing).
- Especially useful when comparing companies with large amounts of excess cash or non-interest-bearing liabilities – giving a more realistic picture of capital efficiency.
📘 Leverage Ratio (Debt-to-Equity)
📈 What is it?
The leverage ratio indicates how much a company relies on interest-bearing debt (such as loans and bonds) relative to its shareholders’ equity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
This ratio helps assess a company’s financial structure and risk profile. High leverage can enhance returns – but also increases exposure to interest rate changes and financial stress.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low leverage ratio signals financial strength and independence.
- A higher ratio can improve returns in good times but increases risk during downturns or rising interest rate periods.
- 👉 Always interpret in the context of industry, capital intensity, and interest rate environment.
📘 Revenue
📈 What is it?
Revenue shows how much a company earns in total from selling its products and services – the gross income before any costs are deducted.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Revenue is one of the key figures to assess a company’s size, market position, and growth potential.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growing revenue indicates rising demand and can be an early signal of future earnings growth.
- Comparing actual and expected revenue reveals trends in the market environment and analyst sentiment.
- Note: Strong revenue alone isn’t enough – margins and profitability matter just as much.
📘 EBITDA
📈 What is it?
EBITDA stands for “Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization.” It reflects a company’s operating profit before the effects of financing, taxes, and accounting depreciation.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBITDA is widely used to evaluate a company’s operating performance – especially across capital-intensive sectors or international comparisons.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high or growing EBITDA indicates strong operational profitability – independent of taxes, interest, or accounting methods.
- It’s especially useful for comparing companies across sectors or geographies.
- Important: EBITDA is not a net income figure – it excludes key costs like depreciation and interest.
📘 EBIT
📈 What is it?
EBIT stands for “Earnings Before Interest and Taxes.” It reflects a company’s operating profit after depreciation, but before interest and tax expenses.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBIT is a core profitability metric that shows how well the company performs in its main business operations – independent of capital structure and tax environment.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBIT indicates strong profitability from the company’s core business – before financial and tax effects.
- It allows better comparison between companies with different debt levels or tax structures.
- Compared to EBITDA, EBIT already accounts for depreciation and reflects capital intensity more clearly.
📘 Net Income
📈 What is it?
Net income is the company’s total profit – the amount left after all expenses, taxes, interest, and depreciation have been deducted.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net income is the most comprehensive measure of a company’s profitability – showing how much actual profit remains after all business and financing costs.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growing net income indicates that the company is managing all of its costs efficiently.
- It directly influences valuation metrics like P/E ratio and the company’s dividend capacity.
- Over time, net income trends reveal how resilient and profitable the business model really is.
📘 Free Cash Flow (FCF)
📈 What is it?
Free Cash Flow shows how much actual cash remains after a company covers its operating expenses and capital expenditures.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
FCF reflects a company’s real financial strength – regardless of accounting profits. It shows how much flexibility a company has for dividends, share buybacks, or debt reduction.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- High free cash flow means the company generates real, usable cash – independent of reported net income.
- It’s often the most reliable base for sustainable dividends and buybacks.
- Declining FCF can be an early warning sign – even when profits appear stable.
📘 Revenue Growth
📈 What is it?
Revenue growth shows how much a company’s sales have changed compared to the previous year – both on a trailing basis (TTM) and based on forward projections.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected revenue ÷ Revenue in prior year − 1) × 100
Forward growth is based on analyst estimates for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Rising revenue signals growing demand, business expansion, and market share gains – especially important for growth-oriented companies.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growth is the engine of long-term value creation – especially in tech and growth sectors.
- What matters is not just current growth, but its sustainability.
- Forward projections reflect whether analysts expect continued momentum – or a slowdown.
📘 EBITDA Growth
📈 What is it?
EBITDA growth shows how much a company’s operating profit (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) has increased or decreased compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected EBITDA ÷ EBITDA from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate is based on analyst projections for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Growing EBITDA indicates improving operational profitability – regardless of financing or accounting effects.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Strong EBITDA growth signals operational efficiency and scalability – especially during growth phases.
- EBITDA growth can be an early indicator of margin and earnings expansion – but should be assessed alongside revenue and EBIT.
📘 EBIT Growth
📈 What is it?
EBIT growth shows how much a company’s operating profit (after depreciation, but before interest and taxes) has increased compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected EBIT ÷ EBIT from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate is based on analyst projections for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBIT growth is a direct indicator of a company’s business performance – taking into account capital intensity through depreciation.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Rising EBIT signals improving operating profitability – even after accounting for depreciation.
- It’s especially important for evaluating companies with significant capital expenditures.
- Combined with revenue and EBITDA growth, EBIT growth provides a well-rounded view of operational progress.
📘 Net Income Growth
📈 What is it?
Net income growth shows how much a company’s bottom-line profit has increased or decreased compared to the previous year – both on a trailing basis (TTM) and based on analyst projections.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected net income ÷ Net income from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate reflects analysts’ expectations for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net income is the ultimate measure of profitability. Growing net income signals stronger efficiency, cost control, and sustainable earnings power.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Stronger net income boosts valuation, dividend potential, and investor confidence.
- If profits stall while revenue grows, it may signal margin pressure.
📘 Free Cash Flow Growth
📈 What is it?
Free cash flow (FCF) growth shows how a company’s available cash – after covering operating expenses and capital expenditures – has changed compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Free cash flow reflects real financial strength. Growing FCF indicates more flexibility for dividends, share buybacks, and reinvestment.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Declining FCF may point to rising investments, increasing costs, or weaker operating performance.
- Especially for dividend investors, FCF growth is critical – since dividends are paid from actual available cash.
- A negative trend isn't always bad, but it deserves closer attention.
📘 Gross Margin
📈 What is it?
Gross margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains after deducting the direct costs of goods sold (like materials and production). It represents the company’s “raw profit” before fixed costs, taxes, and interest.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Or simply: Gross Margin = Gross Profit ÷ Revenue × 100
🏛️ Why is it important?
Gross margin indicates how efficiently a company can produce or procure what it sells. It is a key measure of product-level profitability and pricing power.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high gross margin suggests strong pricing power and efficient production.
- Falling margins may signal rising input costs or competitive pressure.
- Compared to peers, gross margin offers insights into the quality of a business model.
📘 EBITDA Margin
📈 What is it?
The EBITDA margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as operating profit before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.It reflects operating efficiency without being distorted by financing or accounting factors.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The EBITDA margin reveals how much operating income a company generates per dollar of revenue – independent of capital structure and tax effects.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBITDA margin reflects strong core profitability – before accounting distortions.
- It allows for effective comparisons across companies and sectors.
- A stable or growing margin signals efficient cost control and business scalability.
📘 EBIT Margin
📈 What is it?
The EBIT margin shows what percentage of revenue remains as operating profit after depreciation but before interest and taxes.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The EBIT margin reflects a company’s core profitability while accounting for capital intensity (e.g. machinery, infrastructure). It’s especially useful for comparing businesses with different levels of depreciation.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBIT margin shows that the company remains efficient even after factoring in depreciation.
- It’s especially relevant for capital-intensive industries.
- Stable or rising EBIT margins over time are a strong indicator of pricing power and business quality.
📘 Net margin
📈 What is it?
Net margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as bottom-line profit after deducting all costs, interest, taxes, and depreciation.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net margin reflects a company’s overall efficiency – across operations, financing, and taxation. It shows how much actual profit is generated from each dollar of revenue.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high net margin means the company is not only strong operationally but also manages financing and taxes efficiently.
- Peer comparisons reveal business quality and competitiveness.
- Declining margins despite revenue growth can be a red flag for rising costs or inefficiencies.
📘 Free cash flow margin
📈 What is it?
The free cash flow (FCF) margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as actual free cash after covering all operating expenses and capital expenditures.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
This margin reflects the true liquidity generated by the business – independent of accounting rules or depreciation. It’s especially relevant for dividends, buybacks, and reinvestment decisions.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high FCF margin means a company consistently generates strong cash flow.
- It’s a positive signal for financial stability and shareholder returns.
- The long-term trend is key – a declining margin may indicate rising investments or weakening operating efficiency.
📘 Earnings per share (EPS)
📈 What is it?
Earnings per Share (EPS) shows how much profit is attributable to a single share – and is one of the most important metrics for evaluating a company's performance.
🧮 How is it calculated?
The diluted share count reflects potential new shares that could be issued through options, convertible bonds, or other rights.
🏛️ Why is it important?
EPS is the basis for many key valuation metrics like P/E ratio, PEG ratio, or payout ratio. It enables comparisons of profitability across companies, regardless of their size.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- EPS captures per-share profitability and is especially useful for comparisons over time or with analyst estimates.
- Rising EPS may signal consistent growth or share buybacks.
- Important: Always use diluted EPS for more realistic valuations – especially in companies with stock-based compensation.
📘 Free cash flow per share (FCF per share)
📈 What is it?
Free Cash Flow per Share shows how much free cash flow a company generates per outstanding share – after investments, but before dividends or debt repayments.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Free cash flow is calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures (CapEx).
🏛️ Why is it important?
FCF per Share reveals how much real cash is available per share – useful for dividends, buybacks, or reducing debt. Unlike net income, free cash flow is harder to manipulate and often seen as a more reliable metric.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- High FCF per share signals strong financial flexibility.
- It shows how much capital the company can effectively reinvest or return to shareholders.
- Particularly relevant for dividend payers and capital-efficient businesses.
📘 Short interest
📈 What is it?
Short interest indicates how many shares of a company are currently sold short – that is, borrowed and sold by investors who expect the price to decline.
🧮 How is it calculated?
It reflects the percentage of a company’s shares that are being shorted relative to the total shares available.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Short interest serves as a sentiment indicator: A high value may signal skepticism or bearish expectations – but also increases the potential for a short squeeze if prices rise unexpectedly.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Low short interest usually indicates market confidence in the company.
- High short interest can be a warning sign – or an opportunity if sentiment shifts.
- Especially relevant in volatile markets or ahead of key earnings releases.
📘 Employees
📈 What is it?
The employee count shows how many people a company employs worldwide – offering insights into its size, structure, and business model.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps assess operational scale, labor intensity, and cost structure. Combined with revenue and profit, it enables key metrics like revenue per employee or productivity.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high headcount can signal operational complexity – but also significant growth capacity.
- Revenue per employee is a key indicator of efficiency.
- Especially useful for comparing tech, industrial, or service-heavy companies.
📘 Turnover per employee
📈 What is it?
Revenue per employee indicates how much revenue a company generates on average per employee – a key measure of efficiency and productivity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
The employee count is typically taken from the most recent annual report.
🏛️ Why is it important?
This metric helps compare business models – especially between labor-intensive and technology-driven companies. A high value suggests automation, operational efficiency, or strong value creation per head.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high revenue per employee indicates a scalable and margin-strong business model.
- A low figure may reflect labor-intensive operations or lower value-add.
- Especially helpful when comparing tech companies to industrial or service sectors.
SpaceX Stock Analysis
Analyst Opinions
43 Analysts have issued a SpaceX forecast:
Analyst Opinions
43 Analysts have issued a SpaceX forecast:
SpaceX Events
Past Events
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SEP
10
Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
14 days ago
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AUG
4
Q2 2026 Earnings Call
about 2 months ago
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JUN
7
Special Call - Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
4 months ago
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JUN
3
Special Call - Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
4 months ago
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StocksGuide Free
SpaceX — Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
1. Question Answer
Okay. I think here we go. We're going to get started with our next fireside chat. It's my pleasure to welcome SpaceXAI to the conference this year, Bret Johnsen, CFO. I am going to do a little bit of housekeeping, and then Bret and I are going to get into a conversation. And with a company like this, we are going to try to cover as much ground as we possibly can, but I'm up against a shot clock.
So some of the statements made today by SpaceX may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and SpaceX undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to SpaceX's Form 10-Q for a discussion of risk factors that may impact actual results.
Bret, thanks for agreeing to do the conference.
Thank you.
Great to have the opportunity to talk. Let's start with what we've even talked about in some of our work, which is the central theme, I think, of this company is vertical integration. Talk a little bit about how that is the anchor for this company, both at the company level and even at the segment level.
Yes. I think vertical integration is core to who we are. I totally agree with you. We really believe that we are building the infrastructure of the future, and we're taking a very different approach, and we have since inception. If you go back to the old days when we were a rocket company, which wasn't too long ago, by the way, we have always taken a very vertically integrated approach. And starting when we were really just focused on rockets in the beginning or I should say, rockets and spacecraft, a lot of it was because we couldn't find elements of the supply chain that were moving at the pace we needed or in an element of quality that we needed for sure. And quality is so important when you're flying payloads to space, especially when the payloads could be you and me, right?
And so certainly, that was in our DNA. And then when we looked up and headed down the path of being a communications business and started Starlink, it was the same type of thing over again. We want to own all the way from -- in the rockets, the metal coming in the door to building the engines, doing all the avionics and the software and then the customer relationship. In comms, it became the same thing, where we were owning the launch, we're owning building the satellites themselves and then going to the end customer or enterprise.
And so taking that approach now to the AI side of our business, we are very vertically integrated, all the way to the point that we're building our own infrastructure, we're the GC building the building, putting up the power and then using our own model to get directly to the end customer, whether it's consumer or enterprise and then very soon with orbital compute as well.
Okay. Well understood. Let's come back to that launch business. I think when I think about where you're going over the next 5 to 10 years, so much of it is tied to rapid reusability in the launch business tied to Starship. Talk to us a little bit about the building blocks to take Starship to where you want it to go and what some of the key learnings have been from recent launches.
Well, I'm glad you start with Starship because Starship is so core to the rest of our business in really all the segments. And it's been years and years in the making. We had a huge milestone event with Flight 13. So much learning came from that. If you didn't get a chance to see it, we were able to not only deliver payloads, I would say, demonstration payloads of V3 satellites, but also did a relight of the Raptor engine, but probably most importantly, had the softest splashdown, kind of precision splashdown over the ocean of the second stage.
And then kind of magically, we're able to tow what looked like a big whale back into shore, thanks to the efforts of pretty incredible recovery team on the SpaceX side, we're able to get that vehicle back. And so we were able to get our engineers climbing all over that vehicle to see exactly the environments that the heat shield went through. And there's been so much learning just in the last number of weeks that we're able to take back into our flights coming forward.
So very exciting related to how the heat shield performed already on Flight 13, but then the learnings that we got from that, that will carry right into Flight 14 and beyond. And then we've got another flight coming up later this month for Flight 14, which, for the CFO, is very exciting because it's going to be a revenue-generating flight, right? I love the demonstration flights, and now I'm excited that we're moving into production cadence and flying production V3 Starlink satellites to orbit on our next flight. So I think that will be a huge milestone for us. And then if you look beyond Flight 14, starting to get a shot at bringing back both the first and second stage will be the big milestones coming up for later this year.
Okay. Let's pivot the conversation to AI infrastructure. We'll start with orbital compute. So when you think about orbital compute and you try to conceptualize this for investors, how should investors think about the challenges that are being solved for to stand up and scale orbital compute and the time line over which feasibility and scale can be built in orbital compute?
Yes, it's interesting. I think I've heard conversations and 2 sides of it. One is it feels like almost every leader in the AI industry is willing to openly acknowledge that orbital compute is the future, right? It's clean energy. You don't have all the constraints. You don't affect any type of community from that perspective. And so I think it's clear that a large majority, if not almost everybody think that's the future. But most, if not everybody, other than us, think it's many, many years away.
And the huge difference is we're actually, again, very vertically integrated, and we're in control of all the pieces that are required. And so we're actually targeting to fly our first orbital compute satellites next year. And I think that will be an enormous moment when they start -- when everybody starts to see that we're putting up huge amounts of compute into space going into 2028 because that's the right way to do this anyway. And then everyone will see that the time line is far shorter than people had expected.
Some of that circles right back to Starship, right? So what these are is these are largely the same V3 bus that we were just talking about for Starlink that we're flying literally in the next -- later this month, next coming days and weeks and then changing out the payload, giving it more solar. So certainly, the solar arrays will be larger. And I think that is incredibly important, and people will see that and then realize how close this is to becoming a reality. It doesn't mean we're not continuing to expand our terrestrial footprint on compute as well, but I do think orbital compute is definitely the future.
Okay. Maybe just one last quick one on orbital before we turn to terrestrial. You touched upon it a little bit, but just help us better understand how to think about the cost advantages of orbital compute relative to terrestrial compute because that could be a real competitive differentiation factor for the company over the long term.
Yes. I think that the moment when it becomes better than terrestrial is all about reusability. And really, that's been a core capability of our company for over a decade now. We brought back first-stage boosters for Falcon 9 in December of 2015 and started reflying them the year after that. And so for now a decade, we've been reflying, I think, over 500 rocket boosters now to space reflown. And so it is knowledge that we're carrying into that Starship platform.
And so when you get to the point, hopefully very soon, right, because we've already recovered a first stage multiple times and reflown a first stage of Starship. And you just heard me talk about the recovery progress on the second stage. When you get into, hopefully, as soon as next year, where you're reflying both first and second stage of Starship, the cost curve goes down dramatically.
And what's really great about it is you look terrestrial versus orbital, in terrestrial, everything is getting actually more expensive, right? Just inflation plays out and power gets more expensive, cooling, everything else, buildings, construction, real estate. And so you're actually on the wrong curve for all of us in tech, right? In tech, we're used to -- I was a semiconductor guy before a space guy. You're used to going down that cost curve. Well, the great part is when you're flying orbital compute, you're going down the cost curve. The rockets are going to get more and more efficient, more and more capable. The cost structure will go down related to the deployment cost and the satellite will get more and more cost effective, right?
You'll benefit from Moore's Law or whatever the equivalent there is -- following it. And you'll be able to get to scale and get the economies of scale as well. And so I think you're going to end up going down a cost curve even when you hit parity maybe as soon as next year.
Okay. Super interesting. Let's come back to terrestrial compute. On the earnings call, you guys talked about a goal and a range of getting to terrestrial compute that could be stood up over the next 18 months. Talk to us a little bit about the visibility you have into those potential outcomes, how to think about the cost of standing up that terrestrial compute relative to what you did with Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. Would love to understand the framing of what was put out there.
Yes, absolutely. Well, one of the other things that we did put out, certainly, and it's related to the terrestrial compute and the results thereof is we talked about the fact that by the end of this year, with annualizing our December number, we would -- we're on track or we believe we're on track to hit $100 billion ARR. And what I would tell you an update to that is that just earlier this month, we closed another hosting deal, and that translates into about $1.11 billion a month starting December 1 of this year, which is another roughly $13 billion of ARR that starts December 1 of this year. So I would say we have even more conviction now about that $100 billion ARR target by the end of this year.
I think that's incredibly compelling. If you look at where our company was even a couple of quarters ago to where we'll be by Q4 of this year. And a lot of that's driven by certainly the growth in terrestrial compute. We talked about a range next year of 5 to 10 gigawatts deployed and ending this year with a little over 2. And so that's a lot of additional growth in gigawatts in 1 year.
The reason that we have the confidence is, again, that vertical integration. Circling back, Eric, to that same comment, the fact that we have line of sight to the power specifically because some of it we're going to stand up ourselves in existing locations, I think, is hugely important. Elon talked about even, I don't know, at the beginning of this year or maybe even last year about the fact that he thought power would become the constraint and that people would work through the allocation of some of the rest of the supply chain, but you're seeing that already play out.
In fact, even when we went through the IPO process a couple of months back, when we would say, I think power is actually going to be the issue, and that's why orbital compute will become so compelling, people were still a little -- I'm not sure. I think everybody is seeing it, right? And you're seeing it across the industry now. And it's pretty magical that orbital compute is clearly the solution here on the power and cooling and permitting side. But we wouldn't give that range for next year unless we had line of sight to power specifically, but power and facilities and permitting needed.
Certainly, we have a strong relationship with NVIDIA. In fact, we came out and talked about the fact that we're NVIDIA exclusive. And that strong relationship, we hope, certainly will translate into good allocation from a compute perspective because that's the piece that we don't control. But having a great partner like that is, I think, hugely important.
And so I think the other thing that -- when you talk about that, the other thing that we do that certainly, I think, is helpful for them is when we get this allocation, we stand it up. I think having certainty that you have a partner who's actually going to stand up that compute, not maybe not just for themselves, but also for the industry, it's a different dynamic, right? And I think that relationship has been very strong and will continue to be very strong for us.
Yes, that certainly was an interesting part of the earnings, the partnership with NVIDIA and the framing of that. Talk to us a little bit broadly about your own silicon solutions over the longer term. You obviously have the plan around Terafab, but you're this very important partner to NVIDIA. How do you think about the landscape evolving between first-party and third-party solutions around silicon for, again, against your ambitions of how much compute you want to try to stand up?
I think it's an interesting world for us right now. I mean, we have done these compute deals, right? And almost all of them, if not all of them have been, in essence, 90-day with a 90-day out. So roughly 6-month commits. In fact, the one I just talked about that we just did earlier this month is also the same structure and time line. And I think largely, that's because we have so much internal conviction about our own products. In fact, if you look at our own product cycles, it's pretty great that we closed the deal with Cursor just a few weeks ago. That brings a huge very capable team to us officially now. And you're already seeing improved product cycles, announcing Grok Bot and getting that out there, that's a viral product. It is really amazing. If you haven't tried it, you should.
And it's just getting started down that path, right? And certainly, it takes a little longer on the enterprise side than it does the consumer side related to security and other things you need to work through, but as people start using it and seeing all of the benefits of it and starting to talk to their friends, like anecdotally, that's what I'm seeing constantly around this. We're starting to see that. We saw Grok 4.6 come out and be a notable improvement from 4.5. We're talking about 4.7 here shortly. And so the product cycle is improving, the size of the models, the capability. And so we're in this interesting dynamic where we have so much conviction about these products and more coming that you don't want to get in a situation where you constrain your own products in the years to come because you were giving away the compute forever.
And so it is, for me and for my finance team, it's an interesting one because you're actually basically building this model of I'm going to have this much compute from a wattage perspective and this is my assumption of how I'm going to monetize it. And we know for a certain period of time what the range is. I think on the earnings call, we talked about $30 to $50 is where we expect next year to be from a range of monetization and that we were at the high end of that range is probably the right way -- I think the wording we used. If not, we're on the high end of the range.
And so really now it sets the bar for our internal team. Because you don't want to be pivoting over to your internal solutions and have any degradation related to the monetization. You want to have improvement. But I mean, I don't have the financials of some of these big guys like Anthropic or OpenAI, related visibility of their financials, I should say. I think our financials might be better, whatever. But visibility to their financials to know exactly what they're getting from a monetization of dollars per watt. But based upon what we're seeing, it's higher than the range, right? And that's why it makes sense for them to be coming to someone like us to get the compute.
And it's been a great virtuous relationship, right? We have a very strong relationship with Anthropic and Google, for example. And so you see that and you say to your team, well, look, if you just forecast that range for monetization, when our tools start ramping, it will actually be an improvement to that range, right? When they're using -- when we are using our compute and our software models. So it's pretty great because you could take a situation where you guys want to model something in that range and say, okay, well, I see certainty to that. I actually don't even have to have any conviction on their products and see that.
But all of the upside of the products starting to kick in in the Grok world will all be upside to what I have in my model. And certainly, we're at the very, very early days of something incredibly compelling on the AI evolution, revolution. And really, we're still only in the digital AI side, right? When you start talking about physical AI in the years to come, that even expands the market another fold.
Yes. Understood. Okay. There's maybe 2 themes in there. I just want to pull on the string a little bit. So obviously, you're talking about this third deal for compute. How do you think about the array of potential partners for those types of deals? Because you're standing up compute in a very constrained environment and delivering a solution to the industry that there's a high degree of demand for. How long do we think that narrative could sort of play out? Or how do you even think about who the people are that will call and ask you about that sort of availability?
I mean, it feels like almost everybody. I mean there wouldn't be one company that hasn't called us, and we haven't called them. But other than that, almost everybody else in the industry, first of all, very strong relationships with in many ways and are talking to. And so I think that just speaks to the environment that we're all seeing, right? This hyper, hyper growth dynamic that from everything we're seeing is not slowing down by any stretch. And we don't predict anything other than up and to the right in a meaningful way into next year as well from everything we're seeing. And so when you see that, first of all, you want to continue to invest with great software solutions and do deals like Cursor to make sure anything you can do to get your product right up there is important. But you also then have a lot of conviction about making investments for the future.
The other side of this is the risk related to these investments for us is dramatically less when we're in less than a 1-year payback mode, right? Because you can see a situation even when you're doing 6 months at a time that likely continues beyond that. Now you're sitting with compute that will likely last for, I mean, many, many years. In fact, you're seeing the monetization of many generations old now compute from NVIDIA still holding its own from a pricing perspective.
And so that tells you related to the residual value on these GPUs that it's going to be a great product cycle for a long time. It also opens up markets from a financing perspective, right? Because now you're taking, in essence, creating a whole asset class related to GPU financing because everyone is seeing the value of this.
And in fact, in the earnings call, I talked about the fact and one of my buddies made fun, I'm going to use that line, that not all capital is the same, right? CapEx is not the same. When you're talking about assets that you can buy that others could use as well, that have less than a 1-year payback, that is very different from what the rocket guy would say is like a hangar or a launch tower that let me talk about the next couple of decades for that asset. So it is an interesting time, and it has kind of a ripple effect to a lot of other pieces of the business.
Okay. So one more piece I just want to click on that you mentioned, just to give you the opportunity. So if I think about what's changed over the last couple of months, the closing of Cursor, the success you've had on the model side, that was not where the conversation was 4 months ago, and now it is where it is now, at least based on my experience. So talk a little bit about how that's evolving the strategy. You talked a little bit before about striking a balance in the business. There's compute deals but you don't want to starve your internal operations that want to go and external for the long term. Talk about what you're learning about the opportunity set as a foundational model company, as a solution like Cursor into the enterprise space and how that could build in momentum.
Yes. I mean we have certainly up until this year, and I've been the CFO for 15 years. So we have certainly been all about organic growth, right? And I think really proud of our track record related to capital allocation and value creation. And this year, we certainly did some M&A. Cursor so far this year. But it's because when you're faced with a product cycle as amazing as the AI product cycle, and again, time to market becomes so critical, you then look at how do I get there and how do I get to the very -- not just the frontier, but how am I winning at the frontier. And we feel like we have a very logical strategic advantage because we're an infrastructure company, because of the fact that we have reusable rocketry that nobody really else has, I think the Chinese are trying to get there, right? And to their credit, they've got an amazing space program. And I do think in the years to come, right, we will see things. But not on a Starship level anytime soon, let's put it that way.
And so when you have that asset and you believe that, that should be the solution for infrastructure for AI and that it will drive our cost of compute dramatically lower than others in the industry, then you do want to play it forward even maybe as soon as next year and say, well, if there's multiple solutions out there and our model is even close to at the Tier 1, if not better, hopefully, and our token cost is less, I think that puts us in the best position related to our customers.
And I think in the end, that's the key is you want to be able to say that you're delivering a better service. And we can absolutely say that with rockets, most reliable rocket ever flown, let alone lower cost per kilogram. We can absolutely say that with Starlink. If you look at our Starlink product offering, no one's ever had that before. If you go on an airplane now and it has Starlink, you'll know what I mean or on a cruise ship or at your house for that matter. And now we want to be able to do the same thing with AI.
And honestly, like this is a company that's only used to being #1 and winning. And so what I would tell you is since the IPO, I have a couple of friends that are like, oh, well, at least you got through that. Now you can relax a bit. I'm like, are you kidding me? Probably more intense now than it was because it's such an exciting time. And all we want to do is get out there and deliver the best product. And I think there's an opportunity for us, and you're seeing Grok Bot start to be part of that and Grok continuing to evolve to that. We're not going to settle, not going to settle for anything other than going after being the best product for our customers.
And I think that's really compelling, and I think people are starting to see that. And that's probably the change to your point of maybe the talking points from a couple of months ago is people said, yes, I get it. I understand why you guys could be the best infrastructure solution for AI. But they were a little hesitant related to the products. And already like 90 days later, not even, I think people are seeing, oh, they were very serious about the size of the business as well. It's exciting.
Yes, definitely. I do want to touch upon connectivity. Let's go with Starlink broadband first. You brought up the example of if you experience the product and then not experienced the product, I can personally attest there is a difference for what it's worth. But talk a little bit about what you've learned about the addressable market for Starlink broadband, especially some of the key verticals that you're attacking globally and how you think about building or scaling competitive advantages around that business?
Yes. What's interesting is we started out -- and actually, the first year, we called it, better than nothing service, right, in 2020 or 2021. And we were learning and we were getting satellites out there. And then a couple of years later, it was clear that we had a very strong service. And consumer was still a big focus because we hadn't gotten to the point of being able to go to a CTO, CIO and show that we were 99.9% or 99.99% uptime and that we could give commitment levels and SLAs.
But in the last couple of years, we're there. And enterprise has been a big push and everybody wants to talk to us because when you're now in a world where resiliency is so important, not having Starlink be part of your networking solution just doesn't make any sense, right? And there isn't really another solution that's anything close to Starlink at all. And so you're seeing that, and we're seeing that in almost every industry, this makes sense. Whether you want to use Starlink as your backup or your primary, like why wouldn't you do that? Because certainly, any Board member could look up in any of those companies, why were you down? Like, why wasn't there Starlink in the solution? So I think we're seeing that on the fixed wireless side.
And then we have a huge opportunity in anything related to mobility, right? We were talking about aircraft. We have a huge backlog actually on the aircraft side that we're actually ramping up our production for right now and addressing pretty exciting on that front. Almost every major airline, 3 of the 4 largest, we can't even talk about the one that's not in the fold because it's just kind of embarrassing. But we'll make sure, right, that we embarrass. But cruise ships, yachts, trains, any time where the connectivity wasn't there, it now can be there. And what's great, if you just take cruises or airlines for a minute, is now it's exposure to millions and millions of folks that are getting connectivity from Starlink that otherwise wouldn't. And now thinking, geez, I could have this at my home or office.
And what we're -- kind of what we were facing in the past is actually most of our issue is we didn't have an issue because we're selling every terminal we're making, but issue overall on the demand side was just awareness. People weren't aware that we were there. We still face a lot of that outside the U.S., especially where you go places and you say, well, you could have Starlink. And they ask you what Starlink is like. It just means we have some work to do. But it certainly is a huge opportunity. And I'm very excited actually about what the next step is.
And what I mean by that is even on the broadband, let alone we can talk about mobile in a minute, but the fact that AI and physical AI will probably be a large conversation when we start into next year and beyond of devices everywhere. These devices are going to want to have AI embedded from a knowledge perspective and capabilities will be there, but they also need to be connected basically at all times. And they can't be down. And so connectivity to a humanoid robot or autonomous car or other any type of flying vehicle, like that is not something that you're going to do with terrestrial solutions. And so I think it's going to open up the connectivity market dramatically when you see these solutions coming out because they need so much more data for that connectivity. So it's really exciting on that front.
Understood. Let's turn to the longer term -- the medium- to longer-term mobile ambitions of the company. You've been very upfront about these ambitions. You've invested in assets that can build out a portfolio of solutions to deliver globally into consumers. How are you thinking about investing, building and scaling against the broader mobile telephony opportunity that could present in front of the company in the years ahead?
Yes. Someone asked me just recently, well, is it a distraction at this point? I said not at all. What's beautiful about this model is we're going to take largely the same V3 bus that you're about to see fly in production for our V3 satellites for broadband, and we're going to change the payload out and be able to deliver starting next year, flying satellites for building out our network for direct-to-device, right, for the mobile. And so that's probably all through next year. And then the first half of '28, we'll be able to turn on a service that's completely differentiated from anything out there. And I think that's pretty magical because then you can put that team onto the AI sat as well next year, right?
And so you basically have all because of Starship, which is why I want to start the conversation always when we talk about SpaceX with Starship, this capability that nobody else has and won't for years and years, delivers to all 3 of those businesses, that broadband business, that mobile direct-to-device business and the AI sat business. And so flying those satellites in those constellations will be really, really terrific related to getting our cadence up on our own rocket business as well.
But circling back to direct-to-device, we're planning to fly the satellites next year and have the capability to turn on service first half of '28. And so now what that means is we've got some time to figure out exactly if there are other assets we need related to it, we can look at that. But what we went out and did is we saw that this is where the business was going, and it just looked like a missed opportunity to not be also in mobile when you have this capability to deliver from space that no one's ever had before.
And so we turned on our version 1 of this and flew 600 satellites very quickly within a year, right, and turned on the service that, for example, in the United States, you look at T-Mobile and they call it T-Sat, I think, and that's the Starlink version 1, right? But that's more like a text-only service and maybe light voice, and it's awesome for disaster recovery. It's awesome from an emergency perspective. If you get into a dead zone somewhere, you can still connect. But it's not what you and I are used to with full 5G. The next version of this, what we're going to start flying next year with the satellites is full 5G quality service.
And so now it's a matter of when we go to market, we bought the spectrum, the mid-band spectrum from EchoStar for U.S. And so we feel like we've got the spectrum where we can go turn on service. We've got that. And it has direct from space and terrestrial capability already FCC approved. So if we need to, we can stand up terrestrial solutions to put the terrestrial piece in place, too, or we could work with existing carriers. We're open to, I think, a lot of different ways to do it, but we're marching down that path in the U.S. Overseas, we're probably going to have to go through the same process that we did with broadband, right? We started out with a service that was approved in the U.S. and then over the next couple of years went and now we're in over 170 countries around the world with Starlink on the broadband side. And we worked with each regulator in each country to -- really just to demonstrate that we are bringing a product offering that's better for the consumer.
Again, I think it circles back to is this a product that's better than what's out there. And for sure, it is on the broadband side. And for sure, it will be in an industry that just hasn't innovated for decades, if you think about the wireless industry, right?
In essence, the service you have is largely the same. And I don't remember when 5G was talked about, it was a long time ago. I was at Qualcomm way back in the day, myself. And so now you're talking about being able to come to market with a product that shouldn't have dead zones, can have global roaming, you can go anywhere you need to with it. And that's pretty magical, especially if you're charging same or slightly less than a service that doesn't have any of those things.
And I think that's why the big 3 operators were a little concerned about us and wanted to create a cartel maybe. I don't know what the term is -- but I'm not a lawyer, and I'll let them figure that out. But the point being, I think that the whole industry is seeing that we have the ability to deliver a service that will be really compelling for people.
Yes. Let me try to tie it together with one final question. You face all these decisions about what to invest in, all these different durations and return profiles. Talk a little bit about allocating capital to all of these opportunities and then bring it home with the theme of like what are you the most excited about to continue to demonstrate to the market in the years ahead?
Yes. I think our track record on capital allocation kind of speaks for itself. But what it looks like there's a lot of different things we're investing in. I think really right now, you should think we're investing in Starship specifically because it enables our other businesses, and we're investing in terrestrial compute because the better we get at that, I think, will help us on the orbital compute side and will also be an incredible funding mechanism for some of the other pieces of the business.
I think in the longer term, I think right now, the piece that's still a little misunderstood is orbital compute simply because I think the time frame that others have related to when is this going to be bringing gigawatts or tens of gigawatts to the table is different than what we're actually going to be able to deliver. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Great. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate you being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking SpaceX for being part of this.
Thank you.
SpaceX — Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
SpaceX says Starship-driven reuse and vertical integration will rapidly lower launch costs, scale Starlink/mobile, and accelerate orbital compute.
🎯 Key Message
- Takeaway: Vertical integration plus Starship reusability is the company’s organizing thesis: lower launch costs fund faster satellite cadence, enable large-scale terrestrial and orbital AI compute, and support global direct-to-device mobile and broadband services.
⚡ Strategic Highlights
- Starship: Flight 13 yielded heat‑shield and relight learnings; Flight 14 will be revenue-generating with production V3 Starlink satellites; goal to recover both stages later this year.
- Orbital compute: Plan to fly first orbital compute satellites next year using the V3 satellite bus with larger solar arrays to deliver substantial space-based compute.
- Terrestrial compute: Targeting 5–10 GW deployed next year (from ~2 GW now); NVIDIA exclusive partner and recent hosting deals to ramp revenue.
🔭 New Information
- ARR add: Closed a hosting deal that adds ~$1.11B/month (~$13B annualized) starting Dec 1, increasing conviction in year-end $100B ARR target.
- Timelines: First orbital compute satellites next year; direct‑to‑device mobile satellites flown next year with service capability in H1 2028.
- Product moves: Completed Cursor acquisition; Grok product cadence accelerating.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Cost parity: Management argues reusability and Starship refly (both stages) will push orbital compute down a cost curve versus terrestrial, possibly reaching parity as soon as next year.
- Monetization: Guidance-range monetization per watt next year ~$30–$50 and management says they're at the high end today; terrestrial hosting deals are short‑term committed structures.
- Capital allocation: Priorities are Starship (enabler), terrestrial compute scale, and selective M&A/product buys; silicon strategy balances NVIDIA partnerships and internal Terafab development.
⚡ Bottom Line
- Impact: This fireside chat tightens SpaceX’s narrative: technical progress on Starship and recent hosting deals materially increase revenue visibility and make orbital compute a nearer-term strategic option. Upside depends on execution (Starship reusability, satellite production cadence, regulatory approvals) and continued supply/partner allocations. Shareholders get high growth optionality but execution risk remains high.
SpaceX — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for SpaceX's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Andrea Williams, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Elon, Gwynn and Bret and we are speaking to you from our facility in Bastrop, Texas.
Our second quarter financial results were announced just after 3:00 p.m. Central Time, and all relevant materials have been published to our Investor Relations website at ir.spacex.com. For this webcast, our prepared remarks will be followed by a question-and-answer session. We will take live Q&A from equity analysts and then move to questions directly from our investors that were pulled on our dedicated earnings Q&A platform. Thank you to everyone who submitted your questions in advance.
During this webcast, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC, including our final prospectus and today's published Form 10-Q.
Additionally, during this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP measures. In our press release and our filings with the SEC, you can find additional disclosures, including all reconciliations with comparable GAAP measures.
For the second quarter of 2026, we announced the following financial results as compared to the prior-year quarter, revenues of $7.8 billion, up 92% from $4.1 billion; a quarterly net loss of $541 million, an improvement of $467 million and adjusted EBITDA of $3.5 billion, up 191% from $1.2 billion.
Now I will hand the call over to Elon for his opening remarks.
Thank you. So it's been another milestone -- thank you. So it's been another milestone year for SpaceX so far. We're making great progress developing a fully and rapidly reusable, reliable rocket with Starship. We're connecting millions more people globally across 170 markets with fast, reliable Starlink Internet, we're building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else, we believe. And we're significantly improving our AI models, most notably with the release of Grok 4.5 last month. And now I'll dive into each of those topics separately.
So with Starship, we completed 2 successful flights of Starship V3 in the past 90 days. Flight 13 demonstrated core capabilities necessary to achieve an orbital mission and return to Starbase for catch. And on Flight 14 will be our first flight to fly our Version 3 Starlink satellites or communication satellites to operational orbit. We -- we'll try to actually catch the first and the second stage of Starlink V3 this year, and we could possibly catch the ship as soon as the next flight.
And it's difficult to actually explain to most people, just the incredible significance of Starship. And I think perhaps describing it in terms of tonnage to orbit is a good way to appreciate the magnitude of the impact Starship will have on the future of civilization. So right now, we deliver, call it, roughly 2,500 tons a year to orbit via Falcon. And this is a big number by normal standards. The rest of the world, I think, delivers around 300 tons. So we deliver 80% to 90% of total earth mass to orbit per year with Falcon.
Now with Starship, our aspirations, and I think we will achieve these aspirations, are to deliver well over 1 million tons to orbit per year and probably ultimately 10 million tons per year. So this is not -- like if you had a chart where you plotted things, you would need a very, very big table to put the chart on to see to even see -- to even see any of our competitors on that chart and to make it -- so our next biggest competitor was 1 pixel high on the bar chart. You would still need a very big bar chart to represent the SpaceX Starship vehicle.
And it's worth noting that we actually encourage our competitors to copy us. We do nothing to slow them down. We actually launched -- we launched competing satellite constellations at fair price is the same price we charge everyone. So we do encourage our competitors to copy us, but it's quite difficult to copy something like Starship. But we don't use patents as sort of a land mine exercise to stop people from copying us. We actively encourage it.
So anyways, but when you think about it on at, we go from 2,500 tons a year to 1 million, potentially 10 million tons per year. It's really a ridiculously profound difference. But that is our plan, and I think we will achieve that plan.
Regarding Starlink, it's also worth just noting that the Starlink V3 satellite is about an order of magnitude more capable than the Starlink V2 satellite, which was already a very capable satellite. And we expect to launch about a order of magnitude more Starlink V3 satellites. So that would mean roughly [indiscernible] order of magnitude increase in the delivered bandwidth. Even if our monetization per bit dropped by a factor of 10, that would still mean a 10x increase in the revenue of Starlink. So I think people are really underestimating Starlink here.
So this is -- this is a big deal. It's kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but it's not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world's Internet, at least in countries where we're allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries. So this is important to bear in mind, and it's not unlike the infinity future. It's less than 10 years.
So -- and with the advent of AI and humanoid robotics and vehicle robotics and just a massive number of robots, the appetite of bandwidth will be much greater than it has been in the past. You think of a human consuming, perhaps or producing perhaps a few hundred bits per second of output. And actually, the average human is outputting less than 1 bit per second over the course of a day, which is [ 86,000 ] seconds. Now computers easily do billions of bits per second continuously over a 24-hour period. So this is why I would expect the appetite for bandwidth to grow dramatically with the growth of AI and robotics. And really, I think Starlink is the only [ connection ] that can actually service that bad work.
Regarding AI, we're making rapid progress on Grok, Grok 4.5 was a huge improvement. And we have Grok 4.6 coming out probably next week. And then Grok 4.7 is about 3 or 4 weeks from today. And we expect the cadence of AI development to improve dramatically. And then with Grok 5, which should be out before the end of this year, we will be incorporating the entire corpus of SpaceX data. Basically, all the data that SpaceX has ever produced, which is a tremendous amount over the course of a quarter century will be incorporated into Grok training. And we think this will make Grok by far the best engineer. So this is -- these are all like very big things.
In addition, of course, we are providing compute to others, and we are building and deploying compute, I think, faster, or our rate of growth certainly is faster than anyone else. And our efficiency of compute deployment, I think, is also the highest. So we expect to end this year with over 2 gigawatts of compute. And probably our cumulative compute online by the end of next year will be several times higher. So it may, let's say, be closer to 10 gigawatts of compute than 5 gigawatts of compute. That's a way to think about it.
And going forward, we've decided to build exclusively on NVIDIA because we think the [indiscernible] architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with NVIDIA. So we're exclusive to NVIDIA.
And this new capacity coming online will obviously further benefit the development of Grok as well our Cursor acquisition, which should close quite soon. I think we're through almost all of the regulatory hurdles. And then with respect to the [indiscernible] AI satellite, which will be essentially an optimized [indiscernible] [ NVL72 ] computer, this is not some sort of far-future, distant thing, we expect to start launching these next year. And the -- we think the design of the [indiscernible] computer is a much better design than is typical -- than say, having a standard rack-style design, and so we expect to actually deploy this on the ground as well as in orbit because we think it's going to be a radical simplification of the normal [ MVL72-rack ]. It will cost less, it will be more effective. And so if we're going to put it in space, why not want to put it on the ground. So I think that's going to be pretty cool.
In conclusion, the SpaceX team is solving some of the hardest engineering problems in the history of humanity. And we're -- I think the team is succeeding because I think we've got in a lot of ways, the smartest, most dedicated team of humans that has ever existed. I'm incredibly proud to work with such a team and I'd like to thank the team for their incredible hard work. And also thank you to investors who have supported us along the way.
Thanks, Elon. We had an exceptional second quarter. And today, I'll focus on the operational and commercial highlights as well as the initiatives we are -- prioritized going forward.
Starting with our Space business. We remain the leading launch provider globally with 78 total launches and 1,041 tons of mass to orbit delivered in the first half of this year, primarily allocated to our own internal Starlink missions, but with great customer missions as well. While our launch capabilities are key to supporting our Connectivity business, we continue to have a very robust commercial manifest and a very robust and growing U.S. government mission demand, which drives revenue for the segment.
We're currently launching at our highest Falcon cadence and are on the precipice of operationalizing Starship. As Elon said, the first 2 flights of our V3 Starship vehicles put us in an excellent position to achieve our near-term goals of reaching orbit, catching and reusing the ships and boosters and deploying our V3 Starlink broadband satellites.
Speaking of which, Starlink had a standout quarter, driven by continued growth across our consumer, enterprise and government businesses. During the second quarter, we added net more than 1.7 million Starlink subscribers globally, consumer. This reflects our best quarter of new customers to date, an increase from the 1.4 million we added during the first quarter. We achieved this by holding ARPU, which is the average revenue per user, stable at $66 per month compared to the first quarter.
We ended the second quarter with service availability in 167 markets and have continued to activate new markets since then with some very exciting announcements coming soon, maybe even as early as today. As of June 30, our constellation of operational Starlink, broadband and mobile satellites in orbit grew to roughly 10,200 with our 9,600 broadband satellites delivering roughly 800 terabits per second of total downlink capacity. Following a successful speed run test of the V3 Starlink satellites on the most recent Starship launch, during which we connected every satellite through every laser [ link, ] we intend to deploy V3 satellites into the constellation for operational use on the upcoming Starship missions.
The significant amount of capacity we're able to add to the Starlink constellation from the V3 satellites will enable us to continue providing even better service. I think it's pretty great already, but to do so while serving more and more customers over the world. In fact, in the years ahead, we expect Starlink will represent a significant portion of global Internet traffic, which Elon also talked about.
We also see significant growth opportunities for Starlink in enterprise -- on the enterprise and government side of the business. We believe revenue from these markets have the potential to reach a scale at least comparable, but likely exceed our consumer business as we continue to gain share. In the second quarter, we signed a major agreement with American Airlines as well as activated our service with new partners, including Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus. We have become the provider of choice among major airlines with outstanding customer feedback, but still have significant room for growth.
In fact, we heard from one of our airline customers, shockingly, customers are flying shorter hop flights instead of direct so that they could ensure that they're on a Starlink-activated flight. They've never seen this in the business before.
On the government side, we won more than $6 billion in U.S. contracts in Q2, supporting major space force programs that offer our nation mission-critical communications and sensing capabilities, and we see even more room for growth in this sector in this coming year. In Q2, we also launched the new Starlink mobile partnerships with international carriers, including SoftBank, NTT Docomo and Spark New Zealand. Our near-term priority is launching mobile V2 satellites on Starship ahead of integrating the 65 megahertz of EchoStar spectrum later next year. This spectrum transfer was recently approved by the FCC and represents a foundational competitive advantage for Starlink mobile.
In AI, the industry is hurdling towards ever more compute demands. We're rapidly expanding our compute capacity to meet our own needs as Grok expands as well as those for other leading companies such as Google and Anthropic. In terms of our own Grok models, the enterprise feedback on rollout of Grok 4.5 has been very positive so far. Token consumption tripled out of the gate after the July release and we continue to see strong signals on usage and monetization for the model. We're looking forward to welcoming the Cursor team to SpaceX to integrate our engineering and begin to benefit from a combined sales capability.
In review, our momentum as a business is extraordinary. Our engineering teams are scaling Starship and our next-gen satellites while our sales teams expand Starlink, aviation mobility and global markets. At the same time, we're bringing on additional compute capacity and expanding and deepening our AI partnerships across a broader set of customers.
And then while I've been in this business for 24 years. I could not be more excited about the months ahead with all the exciting and amazing things going on. It really feels like we're just getting started all over again. Now I'll turn the call over to Bret.
Thank you, Gwynne. We demonstrated strong results in Q2. Revenue growth accelerated across every segment. We narrowed our net losses by nearly half and on a year-over-year basis -- on a year-over-year basis, and we grew adjusted EBITDA meaningfully faster than revenue. Importantly, we significantly strengthened the balance sheet through our IPO and inaugural investment-grade bond offering. The combination of our global launch leadership, recurring Starlink revenue and rapid growth in AI infrastructure continues to drive improved operating leverage. Now I'll walk through the financials for each segment.
For the Space segment, revenue grew 55% sequentially and 29% year-over-year to $962 million, driven by a higher number of larger customer launches and a favorable customer mix. Segment costs and expenses rose $389 million year-over-year, and we continued to accelerate R&D investments in our Starship program.
Starship aims to quadruple payload capacity and reduce launch costs by 10x compared to our Falcon 9 rocket, unlocking significant capabilities across all of our business segments. We continue to make progress building the infrastructure required to support thousands of Starship launches per year, including accelerating Raptor and launch vehicle production, the build-out of our [ Gigabase ] and making significant progress towards activating multiple launch pads at [ Starbase ] and in Cape Canaveral at Pad 39A and Pad 37. Space adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $205 million for the quarter, primarily reflecting these higher R&D expenses.
Moving to the Connectivity segment. Revenue was up in the Connectivity segment by -- or was up to $4.3 billion, up 32% sequentially and 66% year-over-year. Growth was driven by record net additions of Starlink subscribers and a sharp increase in enterprise and government revenue. Starlink subscriber ARPU was $66, unchanged compared to Q1.
As we continue our global expansion, we're taking a localized go-to-market approach that ensures our product and service offerings fit local needs. While our geographic expansion may drive down blended ARPU over time, we anticipate continued subscriber momentum to deliver strong revenue growth.
Enterprise and government revenue grew 108% year-over-year and represents a durable source of revenue, contributing to strong segment margins overall. As Gwynne mentioned, we see enormous opportunity for growth in this segment as we remain, for example, less than 10% penetrated in 1 of the largest segments being aviation.
Total costs and expenses for the Connectivity segment increased $970 million or approximately 58% year-over-year. The increase was driven by higher spend to support our revenue growth, including growth in our satellite constellation, increased R&D investment for our next-gen Version 3 satellites and incremental marketing spend. As Elon mentioned, our Version 3 satellites are expected to deliver 10x the amount of broadband capacity and data density from our current generations, which I think we believe are already pretty amazing, and which are essential to supporting continued subscriber growth and higher value service tiers.
Income from operations from the Connectivity segment increased 79% year-over-year to $1.7 billion, outpacing revenue growth and driving nearly 3 points of operating margin expansion. Connectivity segment adjusted EBITDA rose 64% year-over-year to $2.6 billion.
AI segment revenue was $2.6 billion, up 213% sequentially and 247% year-over-year. The increase was driven primarily by new cloud services agreements, as well as growth in Grok and X subscription revenue. Advertising revenue grew 7% sequentially as we overhauled our advertising platform technology to enable AI functionality and enhanced self-service for all customer types.
In Q2, we entered into cloud services agreements providing access to compute capacity at our Colossus and Colossus II sites. The initial ramp from these agreements contributed $1.6 billion of incremental AI infrastructure revenue in the quarter. Total cost and expenses for the AI segment rose $1.6 billion year-over-year, reflecting increased R&D primarily due to higher infrastructure spend as we accelerated compute deployment. We meaningfully narrowed our AI segment net operating loss to $1.3 billion and turned adjusted EBITDA positive for the segment in the second quarter at $1.1 billion.
The incremental revenue from new hosting deals generated high incremental EBITDA margins as we monetized available compute capacity. We ended the second quarter with 1.4 gigawatts of nameplate compute, up from 1 gigawatt in Q1 and 400 megawatts a year earlier. We expect to end this year at over 2 gigawatts of compute capacity.
Total company capital expenditures in the second quarter were approximately $18.4 billion, of which roughly $15.8 billion supported AI compute infrastructure. The remainder funded ongoing Starship and launch infrastructure, satellite production and global ground station expansion. Additionally, we paid out $856 million during the quarter under our spectrum credit agreement related to our pending EchoStar transaction.
Our capital allocation priorities remain clear and disciplined. We plan to continue to invest aggressively in the 3 areas we believe generate the highest long-term returns, Starship development and production scale, next-generation Starlink broadband and mobile constellations and AI compute infrastructure. Across all 3 of these investments, we remain focused on capital efficiency, return on investment and preservation of a strong investment-grade balance sheet.
The second quarter was transformative from a capital markets perspective. We completed our initial public offering, raising approximately $85.7 billion in net proceeds and followed that with a $25 billion inaugural investment-grade senior notes offering that was partially used to repay our $20 billion bridge loan. The senior notes were issued across 5 tranches with a weighted average interest rate of 5.855% and average maturity of 11.7 years. We ended the quarter with $100 billion of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and $47.5 billion in backlog.
Looking ahead, we continue to see robust demand in all 3 of our business segments, but in particular, in our cloud services arrangements. We see increasingly favorable economics with each agreement we signed. And as Elon mentioned, we expect the supply-demand imbalance in the compute market to continue. The current economics have translated into a less than 1 year payback on our new capital deployments for compute. For example, in the first few weeks of the third quarter, we've already contracted an additional $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue over a 6-month period that begins ramping starting in October of this year. We believe this puts us on a trajectory including contribution from Cursor to reach $100 billion of ARR or annualized revenue run rate by the end of this year based on our expected revenue in the month of December of this year.
With that, I'll turn the call back to [ Andrea. ]
Thank you, Elon, Gwynne and Bret. This concludes our prepared remarks. For today's Q&A session, we will take our first questions from the equity analysts. [Operator Instructions] Operator, please proceed with the queue.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.
2. Question Answer
Maybe just one on the Connectivity segment. Can you discuss the backlog of enterprise and government contracts that segment of the business and how we think about that backlog, converting it to revenue and what that might mean for the pace and cadence of growth in the next couple of years?
Yes. We are quite bullish on our enterprise activities. I mentioned a loan that we received from the government, over $6 billion in contracts. Those are -- you can look at those as tranches and beginnings of additional capability that we will bring online, some of which we will have to compete. But fundamentally, we have the contracts in place to fulfill many phenomenologies, both the ones we've recently announced as well as additional ones that we'll be working on going forward.
Enterprise revenue is quite sticky. We have never lost an enterprise customer. They're quite happy with the Starlink capability that we have right now. Bret mentioned, we are only 10% penetrated in the aviation industry, which definitely represents a lot of headroom for revenue going forward. Maritime, I think, is -- Starlink opens up the TAM dramatically. Starlink offers the capability that other -- that ships that don't really have much connectivity right now because they can't afford VSATs, we can basically outfit those ships with Starlink Maritime. So I'm quite bullish on enterprise, very bullish on government and quite happy with the stickiness that we've seen in those markets.
Yes. I'll just elaborate a little bit on that, which is that obviously, in order to secure a large amount of enterprise revenue, you have to demonstrate a very high reliability, very high uptime. And in the early days, Starlink did not have high uptime. And there's a lot of enterprise customers, most enterprise customers, I'd say that do -- that still have that maybe early Starlink experience, where it was a little patchy.
So we actually -- we're building up a large enterprise sales team just to go out there, meet with enterprise, basically corporate and government customers, show them the incredible uptime and low latency of the Starlink system today. So they realize that they can actually treat Starlink as a primary provider, not sort of as a backup provider. This requires just going out there, talking to people, educating them about the currency of the Starlink system and where it's going. And I would expect enterprise revenue to substantially exceed consumer revenue.
Your next question comes from the line of Adam Jonas with Morgan Stanley.
Elon, first one for you. Just confirming, you said you expect to be closer to 10 gigawatts of nameplate compute by end of '27, closer to 10 than 5. Do you have line of sight? How confident is your line of sight on permitting, chips and turbines for that? And then I have a follow-up for Gwynne.
So we're actually aiming to far exceed that gigawatt number in terms of power online, power cooling and electrical equipment. So our tentative target is to actually have 20 gigawatts at the power and cooling level online by the end of next year. Now I don't think we're going to achieve 20 gigawatts, but we want to have a series of projects that cumulatively [indiscernible] to 20 gigawatts by the end of next year. Some of them won't pan out exactly on time, but I would expect that we still probably have at the power plant level, something close to 15 gigawatts. So assuming that maybe 1/4 of the projects take longer than expected.
So our goal is to have far more power, cooling and electrical equipment, then we have GPUs. That's a logical thing to do given the relative expense of GPUs versus balance of system. SpaceX as a company is incredibly good at hardware. In fact, I'd say probably outside of China, SpaceX and Tesla are the 2 best companies on earth at hardware. Yes. And I think perhaps even including China.
So we're taking a small amount of the expertise that we use for rockets and satellites and applying that to scaling terrestrial data centers. And we're finding that even a small amount of what we've learned, building rockets which are incredibly difficult, applied to data centers yields tremendous benefits.
So yes, we expect to have far in excess of the power cooling that's needed. And then our understanding with NVIDIA is that we will receive a very significant percent of their GPUs next year.
Okay. Just Gwynne, just a follow-up. You were recently asked what is 1 of the more underappreciated parts of the SpaceX investment story. And you said robotics. Can you elaborate on why you believe that? How do robots fit into the SpaceX TAM.
Let me try to put something together for you. I think what I might have said is underappreciating the amount of connectivity that we will need going forward. And I think robotics, especially robotics tied to AI, like for autos and humanoid robot will dramatically increase the demand for connectivity dramatically. Elon talked about that in his early -- in his remarks.
I mean you can think about satellites as being robots. I mean they're autonomous, and they do not need servicing. So -- and then in the sort of what may seem the far future, but will come faster than you think, using robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon, which -- it sounds like super Sci-Fi right now, but it's going to happen, will enable us to build the mass accelerator on the moon. And if you have a mass accelerator on the moon and you have solar and radiator production on the moon, you can -- I know this sounds totally nuts, but you can probably scale to 1,000x the economy of earth in terms of intelligence launch to space, but probably maybe even 1 million times.
So we are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon. We're going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that. And then it's like, well, how much intelligence would you like as we grow towards being a [indiscernible] scale civilization.
Did that get that for you, Adam?
Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn with Citigroup.
One of the hallmarks of SpaceX to date is how efficiently the organization has used capital so far in its journey. But it's also no secret that the capital needs are significant to support your vision from here. Obviously, the company is moving fast. So I was hoping you could talk a bit more about the CapEx outlook across the segments, touch upon any areas where buying versus building might accelerate growth. The mobile strategy obviously comes to mind there. And any related thoughts on capital needs for next steps in extreme vertical integration like [ terra-fab ], anything that's needed to support future growth.
Yes. No, I appreciate the question. I think we are very proud of how we have managed capital allocation over the years for sure. And I think we are continuing down that path, right? If you look at it, we have been very efficient to date, and I think we'll continue to be. If you look at the rest of this year, to answer specifically on CapEx, I think you should probably think that the next 2 quarters are very similar to the current quarter from a CapEx level perspective.
But I do think as you look longer term, I think CapEx, really, I think, from our perspective is all CapEx is not the same, right? What we're seeing right now is a situation where we're able to deploy -- specifically on the AI compute side, we're able to deploy capital in such a way that we're getting less than a 1-year payback. It's almost like your capital is becoming almost an item that you would put otherwise in COGS because it's moving so quickly and as far as monetization and moving into revenue. That's different than, I would say, historically on the SpaceX level where we're building assets that are going to benefit us from launch sites for the next couple of decades. And so we certainly manage for optimizing ROI on our capital all the time from that perspective.
Yes. I'll add a little bit to that. As Bret mentioned, we are expecting to reach a $100 billion-plus ARR in December of this year. And it's probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching $1 trillion in revenue, not ARR, but revenue have moved up from 2031 to 2030. So prior to the IPO, the financial projections we had were reaching $1 trillion in revenue in 2031. We now expect that to be in 2030. And there's a non-zero chance of that being in 2029.
Your next question comes from the line of Ronald Epstein with Bank of America.
Could you walk through what you learned on Starship launch 13, what was better than expected? What was worse? And then how do we think about this in the journey to kind of rapid reusability, the heat shields and so on and so forth.
Sure. So the Yes, actually, Flight 13, I was a little worried about that Flight 13 because think about Apollo 13, things went wrong on that flight. But this flight actually went incredibly well. The heat shield appears to be very robust. The ship is still floating in the ocean, and we expect to recover the ship and bring it back for analysis. So I would say things look very good. And that's why we -- assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, we'll attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month. We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly. And probably a year from now, we will be doing at least 1 flight a day, possibly more.
Your next question comes from the line of [ Doug Anmuth ] with JPMorgan.
Elon, can you elaborate on the key unlocks from leveraging your rockets and satellite expertise just in accelerating the pace of compute build-out? And then totally appreciate the $6.7 billion in incremental compute deals. Can you talk more about just how you expect the supply-demand environment to persist going forward and whether you'll be able to keep this kind of premium pricing for these deals and sustainability.
Sure. Well, as the saying goes, long -- they would say like, this ain't rocket science. Well, actually, rocket science is literally our daily business. And rocket science is idiomatic expression for extreme technological difficulty and there's a reason for it because the thing -- let me tell you what rockets desperately want to do every flight. They desperately want to blow themselves into tiny pieces. And -- but then the engineering struggle is to convince the rocket not to blow itself into tiny pieces and actually deliver payload to orbit. But you'll note that some of our competitors do, in fact, blow their rockets up. This is not a reflection on their -- it does not mean they're incapable. In fact, I think our competitors are very smart people. But despite being very smart, their rockets still blow up.
So now if you apply a small amount of the engineering skill that goes into making gigantic rockets reach orbit on a regular basis reliably to terrestrial data centers. This is like, frankly, the Yankees -- New York Yankees going in and playing a little league team. And it's kind of ridiculous, frankly. This is like -- the terrestrial data centers are a trivial problem compared to making gigantic reusable rockets and which are launched frequently.
And the Starlink satellites also are like alien-level technology. There's still nothing that compares to our Starlink V2 satellites and our V3 satellites are really more than an order of magnitude better than our V2 satellites. So you take a small percentage of that engineering, apply it to terrestrial data centers and you got an amazing outcome. So that's what we're seeing. Yes.
Now from a monetization standpoint, the -- if you say like what's my best guess for monetization per watt of say [indiscernible] my guess is it would be somewhere between $30 and $50. So it's just a guess. I'm just -- take a guess as a guess. But what we're obviously -- what we're seeing with AI is that the intelligence per watt is increasing rapidly. So that means the usefulness per watt is increasing rapidly. And I think anyone who's a close [indiscernible] of the AI arena, you start seeing smaller and smaller models do more and more amazing things.
There's an argument that we may get to the point where even an H-100 is able to deliver useful AI that's comparable to a human engineer. Based on current trends, I think that's not an impossible outcome. So then it's like how useful would that be? I think the usefulness that would be -- is going to be extremely high. I mean, you think of like where was AI 12 months ago? I mean, this was -- 12 months ago would have been August last year. This is -- that would have been before the advent of Claude 4.5, which I think is should be considered 1 of the milestones and the credit to Anthropic. It was, I would say, a shock to the system was how good Claude 4.5 was. And that was 10 months ago basically.
And if you say, what about an AI 2 years ago, I think, well, an AI 2 years ago, feels like something that should be a museum, okay? Where we were like you're not going to believe this, but 2 years ago, this was AI, this relic. So I think by the end of next year, it's not clear to me that there's anything that digital at least that AI won't be able to do based on the current rate of improvement.
Then look at the rate at which logic and memory is being produced. And one must always considered a limiting factor here. Limiting factor currently is memory. The memory output is increasing by around 20% per year. Now normally, that would be fantastically fast and amazing for any large mature industry. But ask yourself, is the demand increasing by 20% a year. No, the demand is increasing by 200% a year, maybe higher. So if you've got demand increasing much faster than supply, then Economics 101 would suggest that the price increases, it does not decrease.
Your next question comes from the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank.
I wanted to come back on the comment about the $100 billion in ARR. Is there any way you can unpack that a little bit and perhaps kind of what it takes to get there?
And then in relation to that, Elon, I know you mentioned you pulled the revenue target forward by a year. Can you maybe call out maybe a few things that gave you this extra confidence?
Well, on the unpacking, I think the key there is it's really growth in all 3 of the business segments. But the biggest piece is -- and we already talked about additional business we've already closed in the first couple of weeks of July on the AI cloud services side. But certainly, as you know, we've already announced some previous deals with Google and Anthropic that start to ramp either later this quarter or in October. And so there's a lot of momentum from that side of the business as well as we're seeing strength in our own models, and cursor coming into the fold as well. So it's really all 3 segments that are driving that, but the cloud services piece being the largest contributor of that piece.
Yes, to be clear, the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That's what we'd achieve if we basically did nothing. So like -- so I think it may be higher than that. Probably will be higher than that. The -- I think in terms of the relative percentage of breakdown of like what revenue generates [indiscernible] I think the breakdown is probably similar to what we shared pre-IPO. It's just happening a year sooner.
And I will go back to what I said and what [ Gwen ] and Bret mentioned earlier, which is that we do expect a very rapid increase in revenue from Starlink communications from the V3 satellite. Because like I said, it's more than 10x the capability of the V2 satellite and we'll be launching 10x as many, and we have the direct to sell constellation going up as well. So if you were looking at the sort of historical growth of Starlink based on V2, but we have a step change, a massive step change happening with the V3 satellite.
Your next question comes from the line of [ John Hodulik ] with UBS.
Great. Two things. First, Elon, just following up on that comment on StarLink Mobile. When do you expect to start launching the V2s. Can you talk about your appetite for additional spectrum after the EchoStar deal? And then just how big do you think the opportunity is in mobile. And if you could compare that to the broadband business, that would be great.
And then secondly, just a quick follow-up on the compute. It looks like you're going to -- you have a big ramp in compute coming in 2027. How should we think of that capacity being leased versus used for -- to train Grok? I guess in other words, how much of that has to be withheld to train Grok versus that can be leased out to third parties?
I'll go ahead and take the Starlink mobile questions, John. We're going to start flying the next-generation Starlink mobile satellite, which is confusing. It's actually the second version as opposed to the V3, which is the broadband next-generation broadband satellite. We're going to start flying those next year. And just so you understand currently the system that we're operating uses about 5 megahertz of bandwidth. And we operate that through local telco providers. We have 65 megahertz of bandwidth available to us through the EchoStar spectrum which gives massive increase in capability.
Another way to look at it is we were also probably 10x the number of satellites. So we -- simplifying, you could look at the the Starlink Mobile leveraging this -- the next-generation satellite and the EchoStar spectrum is being 100x better, [ 10 x 10x ] better than what we've got right now. And it's a pretty decent service. You can do voice and video calls over signal and WhatsApp.
So we anticipate really strong uptake of that capability. As far as revenue, like I'm just going to take a very high level kind of top-down. The Big 3 in the United States, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, roughly between them $600 billion a year, and I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better. We will eliminate dead zones, leveraging the -- basically the satellites in orbit. It will be better during any sort of natural disaster because surprisingly, even though space movies make space looks super dangerous, it is a pretty quiescent environment. And so I'm quite excited about Starlink mobile going forward. We will start to fly the satellites next year, and we will start providing service end of next year.
I guess I should elaborate on -- we obviously have like more than 1 question being asked here. But the -- obviously, if somebody is trying to create a financial model, some of these questions are -- you have to plug in some numbers here. So for Grok training, we do expect the percentage of compute that we use internally for Grok training to decrease over time and to have far more of the compute used for inference or to -- for training and inference compute to others. So I would expect maybe 10% of our compute to be used for Grok training, something like that.
Your next question comes from the line of Kutgun Maral with Evercore ISI.
I had a follow-up on Starlink mobile and your ambitions in the U.S. market in particular. I think a lot of us are trying to better understand what a U.S. direct-to-consumer service could look like to become a true fourth U.S. carrier, would imply well over $100 billion of mobile CapEx over time, much of auction spectrum and greenfield infrastructure. So how are you weighing that potential build plan against the MVNO or acquisition path? And what's your internal base case on how far you'll take this ambition? Or is this all a little bit too premature at this point?
The spectrum that we purchased from EchoStar does have terrestrial components. So we definitely intend to build out terrestrial -- the terrestrial component. So you will have not only the capacity from the satellites themselves, but you will have a build-out of the terrestrial -- basically the hardware and systems necessary to make a true mobile service exactly what you want it to be.
I'm not going to talk about the CapEx for that. It's a little -- well, I don't want to say it's immature. I'm just going to say, I'm not going to talk about the CapEx for that right now. But let's talk a little -- let me give a little hint, and that is you could put a base station, a cellular base station on the -- basically the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish. So you can have kind of these little [ femto ] cells around the country, and you deploy that as you need it. You don't have to necessarily spend many billions of dollars in low-band spectrum all upfront before you deploy your system. So that's why I don't want to talk about the CapEx for building out the terrestrial because we have a lot of really kind of great and new ideas for how we're going to do that. And I think it will be quite CapEx efficient.
Yes. That point is probably worth just a few more words, which is that -- because this is quite an important point. Instead of having to deploy these very expensive and difficult to locate large cellular base stations, we feel reasonably confident that we can deploy a large number of sort of small stations essentially, they're really just Starlink dishes that also provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands and have them be all over the place.
And the Starlink antennas are located in on the roofs of houses and businesses. So they're -- it's -- that they've got sort of a clear view to -- for providing connectivity directly to cell phones on the ground. And in fact, providing connectivity that is, we think, probably better and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers. This is an important point.
Thank you. With the remaining time, we would like to cover some of the questions from individual shareholders. I will read them aloud.
We got a lot of questions on the progress for Starship Human Landing system. Can we provide any updates?
For Starship -- well, obviously, we need to make Starship super reliable for satellites before we put any people on board. But we are expecting to have a very high launch rate and thus achieve a level of safety needed for humans very quickly, probably by the end of next year.
As far as the milestones go, propel and transfer in orbit is critical to our -- both our internal SpaceX as well as our HLS ambitions. [ ARTEMIS 3 ] mission is next year. That's where we will dock with the Orion spacecraft. We will follow that up with a direct to lunar cargo mission on crude. And then we want to put boots on the ground, boots on the moon in 2028.
For the cursor acquisition, there were several questions asking about the combined product road map for the companies once it closes.
I think we'll leave that to -- we'll probably make some announcement or discussion of that outside of the earnings call. but we don't want to jump the gun on regulators for the -- closing the acquisition. So we're trying to get the acquisition close as quickly as possible. I think we're pretty close to that. But we have to be vary of sort of jumping the gun on regulatory closures.
Next question from the individual shareholders. Once you start launching broadband V3 satellites, how quickly will they translate into improved Starlink service?
So we need some critical mass of V3 satellites, probably at least on the order of about 1,000. But probably that's -- I mean, approximately, second quarter next year would be, I think, where we get to that point.
And our last question, is the heat shield the hardest remaining problem for Starship?
Look, I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I would consider the heat shield problem solved at this point. We want to take a close look at the ship that is currently floating the ocean. But all indications from data and our visual inspection suggests that the -- that we have -- we have solved the heat shield problem, which is [indiscernible] the single biggest problem. That doesn't mean we won't make improvements to the heat shield. Of course, we'll make -- we'll continue to make improvements to the heat shield, but I would say that we do not see any technical obstacles at this point to achieving full and rapid reusability.
Thank you. This concludes today's call. You can reach us at ir.spaceax.com, and we will see you next quarter. Cheers.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
SpaceX — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
Robust quarter: revenue and EBITDA jumped as Starlink subscriber growth and AI compute deals accelerate SpaceX’s scale-up.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: $7.8B (+92% YoY)
- Net loss: -$541M (improved $467M YoY)
- Adj. EBITDA: $3.5B (+191% YoY)
- Starlink adds: +1.7M net subscribers in Q2; ARPU stable at $66/month
- AI scale: AI revenue $2.6B (+247% YoY) and 1.4 GW nameplate compute at quarter end
🎯 What Management Says
- Starship: Two successful V3 flights; management expects rapid cadence, reuse (catching stages) and daily flights within a year as production and pads scale.
- Starlink: V3 satellites are ~10x more capable; management expects a step-change in delivered bandwidth and major enterprise/aviation and mobile expansion.
- AI compute: Aggressive build-out (multi-gigawatt targets), exclusivity with NVIDIA, Cursor acquisition to integrate software and sales.
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- Near-term targets: >2 GW compute by year-end; management reiterated a $100B ARR run-rate target by December and pushed $1T revenue horizon from 2031 to ~2030.
- Operational milestones: ~1,000 V3 satellites needed for material Starlink service lift (target ~H1 next year); Starship reuse testing next flight.
- Risks: regulatory approvals, GPU supply/timing and execution on Starship cadence and large CapEx program.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Enterprise/gov backlog: >$6B in Q2 U.S. contracts; management says enterprise revenue is sticky and under-penetrated (aviation ~<10% penetration).
- Compute scale & supply: Questions on power/cooling and GPU availability; SpaceX expects excess power provisioning and material NVIDIA allocations but noted supply is a key constraint.
- Starlink mobile & spectrum: EchoStar spectrum (65 MHz) plus next-gen mobile satellites will drive a major mobile opportunity, with hybrid satellite+terrestrial buildout planned.
⚡ Bottom Line
- Conclusion: Execution-driven quarter: revenue and adjusted EBITDA surged as Starlink subscriber growth and high‑margin AI hosting deals monetize spare compute. The balance sheet and IPO proceeds fund aggressive CapEx for Starship, V3 satellites and data centers, creating large long-term optionality—balanced by execution, regulatory and supply risks.
SpaceX — Special Call - Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
1. Question Answer
[Audio Gap] Launch is foundational to everything you do.
Absolutely.
You are 10 years ahead of the world in reusability, but Starship is designed for rapid reusability and dramatically more mass to orbit at a much lower cost. So can you just talk about launch, how important it is and then Starship in the context of that?
Yes. I think launch, it starts -- if you're going to be a space company, I tell people, it's hard to be a space company and not have assured access to space. And so we started out making sure that we had launch nailed down. And Elon really focused on driving down the cost of access to space at a far cheaper price than anyone had ever even thought of before. We're now lowest cost per kilogram to space ever in the industry, and we're looking for Starship to do another 10x improvement as we get to rapid reusability with Starship. So it is definitely at the core of what we do, and it's the enablement for all of the other businesses, whether it's Starlink or Direct-to-Cell very soon or now AI compute.
And so I think you absolutely have to start when you talk about SpaceX by talking about our launch capabilities. And Starship will be, to your point, next level because what we're doing now is taking on this huge, I would say, like the Holy Grail of rocketry, which is rapid reusability. It's one thing to bring back the first stage, which is amazing, right, and transforming the industry, but we did that 10 years ago with Falcon. What we're doing now is we're flying the largest rocket ever built with the goal of it getting to aircraft like operations. And that is a completely different dynamic, but I think that's what it will take to be that catalyst for the whole space industry related to kind of turning the 2030s into something that we had expected when we were kids related to the space industry.
Where in the Starship program are we? We just had a launch. It was a V3 of the ship and the booster. It felt like, I will admit, it felt kind of like we were both there. It felt like a high-risk event heading into an IPO, but it -- but from my perspective and as far as I could tell from the SpaceX team, it seemed very successful. So, what did we learn? Where are we with Starship? And where are we on that path to rapid reusability?
I think our first launch of V3 that you're referring to from just last week was a huge success for us. The fact that we were able to demonstrate the full system capability, the new V3 raptor engines, all of the changes that you saw on the bottom of the vehicle, all the operational changes that we did as well, and then you saw that soft splashdown at the end of the second stage, I think, gives us a lot of conviction about where we're going, not just in years to come, but really even in the next couple of flights. And that's really exciting because that is, as we were talking about, that platform or catalyst for the rest of the business. Having a rocket that can take 100 metric tons to low earth orbit is going to be hugely important for everything we're about to go do.
And that's 100 metric tons at what cost relative to Falcon? At what cost?
Well, I think as soon as we can bring back that second stage to the tower and start rapidly reusing it in the next, we'll just say, in the next couple of years, I think you're going to experience a 10x from a cost per kilogram to space from where we're at with Falcon today. And so that is, I think, a huge springboard for multiple pieces of our business.
I think of launch as enabling a variety of applications for SpaceX as a company. And if kind of Microsoft, they had the operating system and enabled a lot of applications, launch is foundational. And the first and the biggest and most well-known application is Starlink and your connectivity business. And can you just give us a sense of the scale of that business, the growth of that business?
Yes. It's very exciting because we actually haven't been in the connectivity business for that long. When you think about it, really having our first production satellites in space back 6 years ago and ramping that business to where we're at today with over 10 million customers and over 10,000 satellites that we have now flown to space in 160-plus countries around the world, it is clear that we're delivering a capability that the world really wants. And I think that it just gives you so much conviction when you know you're delivering a great product, and we've had so many notes in. In fact, we send out an email each month with how many communities around the world we've had a positive impact in. It's really special, whether it's indigenous tribes in Canada or down in Brazil, where we're connecting schools or in Africa where they haven't had any connectivity before.
Bringing something like Starlink to the world has been pretty amazing. And so what it's done is it's given us an extension of the mission we were talking about. First and foremost, we want to make mankind multi-planetary. But above and beyond that now, having the ability to connect the other 3 billion people on the planet and really bridge that digital divide has been really special for folks, and I think that really resonates. But yes, I agree, Starlink was that first piece of the business, and I think that that 10 million customers can become hundreds of millions of customers around the world in time because of the fact that it's so much more efficient to deliver to so many different locations from space than it is terrestrially.
And so we're just heading down that path right now, and we're incredibly vertically integrated related to it. So I think we end up being a little bit of the blockers now become our own capabilities, which is great. That's exactly the way we want it. But what Starlink also was, was it was, I would say, that catalyst for the Falcon business to really ramp up operationally because if you don't have payloads kind of lining up, then you don't really have a reason to go from 10 launches to 22. We launched 165 times last year with our Falcon vehicles. And what we would do is we bring multiple stacks of Starlink satellites to the launch site such that when there's an opening between launches of third-party satellites, we can then, okay, we're going to take that slot for Starlink. And so now as you go into our next phase with Starship, I think we have another catalyst like that. And above and beyond Starlink now, we're going to have AI compute satellites.
Absolutely, 100%. And I'm super excited to talk about AI compute, but I do think it is Starlink, I'd love to just double-click there because I am a former telecom analyst, so it is near and dear to my heart. And just some observations that come to mind for me. One, people have forgotten how big the telecom markets are. I just call it round numbers, $800 billion for kind of internet access, $800 billion for cellular connectivity. So a $1.6 trillion market, plus or minus, to within the nearest $200 billion. And what really strikes me as a student of the telecom industry is there's never actually been a differentiated or disruptive product in telecom before. Because everybody has access to the same towers, broadly speaking the same rights of way and the same equipment. The products end up being very similar. And this was true for local telephony. It was true for long distance. It's true for cellular. I am a very serious video gamer. I'm not very good, but I play video games the way a lot of my peers play.
You're my boss.
But I am -- I take it very seriously. And my grandfather used to say that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and skill. And in video game terms, that means having the best GPU and the best connectivity.
Sure.
At every location I've been to, Starlink is better, it is faster and it is lower latency. And I think latency is a very important point for the user experience. So can you just talk about how this product differentiation is going to help you go from 10 million to 100 million to hundreds of millions?
Yes. I think it's pretty funny because it's for sure we'll talk about broadband in a minute, but especially if you think about the Direct-to-Device that we're going to ramp, right? Our next generation of Direct-to-Cell or Direct-to-Device will be 5G quality, right, in the next few years. We're about to bring something that's pretty unique, to say the least, and something I think anyone would want, which is to go anywhere with your phone, have global roaming, be out in the middle of the desert, on the highest mountain and not have dead zones. I mean, these are pretty special things that I think people would want and probably pay extra for, but especially if it's the same price. So I think we are very excited about bringing a very differentiated product to the market.
Again, it feels great when you're bringing a product, I think, that's great for everybody. It's also going to be great for disaster recovery, and when there are emergencies, the fact that the network doesn't go down and you don't have to worry about the tower being out. But circling back on the broadband side, the fact that you can deliver low-latency, to your point, I think that's really critical, low-latency, high-speed capability really everywhere, other than the countries that I'm not allowed to go into, is something that just won't make sense terrestrially.
And so I think it will become harder and harder to justify many of the deployments on a terrestrial perspective because Starlink now exists. And I do think that people really now are starting to see, even on aircraft, right, when you start to see all the announcements, United Airlines, now American Airlines just announced and many of the others without listening over and over again, getting on an airplane and having that type of low-latency, high-speed experience really kind of opens people's eyes to what it could be at their own homes or offices as well.
Awesome. And I do think I'm glad you brought up the disaster, what Starlink -- what SpaceX does anytime there's a natural disaster. It has undoubtedly saved lives. Charging Starlinks for free, turning them on, this has saved lives. So, outside of Starlink and orbital compute, which absolutely merits its own discussion, what are the other applications enabled by Starship or businesses? What are you most excited about?
Well, I do think on the connectivity side, those two businesses will ramp nicely. And what's also great about those is I think when people think about space, they think about the new markets that we will create in the years to come, which I agree with that. Whether it's point-to-point transportation on earth and 30 minutes flying to Singapore kind of thing or whether it's the lunar economy, I think all of those will happen. But what I think people discount is there are massive, to your point, almost $2 trillion of existing markets just in connectivity that are existing markets today for us really. And so the fact that you're able to deliver a better product in an existing Earth market before even talking about space is probably what gets missed some of the time.
And it's not just a better product, you do have a cost advantage.
Yes. You're not digging ditches, right? You're not digging ditches. You're not spending all that huge amount of upfront cost. You really send the terminal out once you've established your network of satellites, you send the terminal out and that's basically most of your customer acquisition cost.
Yes. Better, faster, cheaper has been a winning experience.
It's just good combo.
In my time as a tech investor. But any one or two of those markets, whether it's freight, whether it's point-to-point travel...
I think the next big one though is going to be AI compute. And so we should definitely spend some more time on that, but I think that is a market that really needs Starship to really happen. Because they're large payloads and you really are focused on cost. And so I think that's the one that's kind of near and dear for us because you already see those next two happening, right, and this will just be a significant enhancement. If I think about what Starship's going to do for our broadband satellites, our V3 satellites that we're about to fly in the coming months here on Starship, every Starship launch of those satellites brings 20 times the capability of what we're flying with a Falcon launch today. So it is a huge enablement for our broadband business and soon to bring 5G capability on the Direct-to-Cell.
So Starship, rapid reusability, they really enable this much larger Starlink constellation. That takes us from 10 million to the hundreds of millions. They actually lower the cost of Starlink further by lowering the launch cost. And they enable this exciting new -- and well, they'll enable Direct-to-Cell, which is awesome, but they will enable orbital compute. And I would love to just people hear data centers in space. And after lots of interactions on X, I realized that a lot of people are picturing like a pin to God sized building floating around in space. And that is not what it is.
No.
It is orbital compute is racks in space. And like let's just -- let's start there. Like I'm sure there's going to be images available to people, but just describe what one of these satellites is going to look like so people can conceptualize it.
Yes. I love the racks in space. I might steal that from you. I think that's the right way to think about this. I actually had the same issue when someone said data centers in space internally the first time, I thought, oh, wait, how are we going to connect all these pieces together? And like Johnsen, this is literally like another constellation. Okay? But really, you then realize virtual networking has been obviously a key component of networking for a number of years now. And this is that same concept of virtually networking rack by rack, to your point, of satellites that look just basically like larger versions of the Starlink V3 satellite we're about to fly for broadband.
A lot more solar and now compute over the top related to -- we'll just start with NVIDIA GPUs on there and a large kind of sheet of metal from a radiated cooling capability perspective. But otherwise, it looks largely the same as what we're flying from a comms perspective, although we've pulled the comms payloads off, obviously. But really, I feel like people think that this is a completely new concept for us, and it's not. It's kind of a logical extension of the satellite technology that we're already using today with all the connectivity down to earth with the inter-satellite links connecting the different satellites together, the prop systems. I mean there's so much of what we're already doing with Starlink today that we immediately get to benefit from on these. And I think when people see the picture of one satellite versus another satellite, they kind of aha moment kicks in of, oh, well, these guys are going to be able to do this very quickly.
Absolutely. Yes. So just maybe help anyone listening conceptualize a rack, an NVIDIA rack, the NBL72 rack. The server is like, I don't know, a couple of pizza boxes. And then you stack those servers together, you make a rack, 8 feet high, 3 feet wide, maybe 4 or 5 feet deep. And that rack is going to be at the center of the satellite. It may not have those exact dimensions. It may have more or less than 72 GPUs depending where the engineers land, but we're going to have that rack. We've got solar wings. I tried to eyeball it. It looked like they're 200 or 300 feet long, maybe 150 feet long out to each side. And then it's in a sun synchronous orbit and the radiator stems behind it, so it's always in the shade and cold. And so let's talk about what that design enables, what advantages that enables from a first principles perspective from orbital compute, around power, around cooling, around cost, around latency back to earth.
Yes, it's funny. So I agree on all 4 and the one that I think maybe start with is regulatory, right? The fact that people are already having concerns about, I don't want this data center in my backyard is clearly a trend, a little bit concerning trend. And so the fact that we can bring a clean energy, good for everybody type solution by just sending these up and being powered entirely off the power of the sun is pretty amazing. The fact that the solar cells are in space and get roughly 5x, if not more energy per cell than they get terrestrially because they don't have to deal with going through the earth's atmosphere and they're in sunsync where the sun is on those cells 24 hours a day. And the fact that you can make them cheaper because you don't need the protection, the glass protection on these cells because there's no environmental issues when you're up in vacuum, you start to see these first principles kicking in on the power significantly.
And from a cooling perspective, which is one of the more challenging things already to deal with on the terrestrial side. If you walk in one of our data centers, all that liquid cooling and all the plumbing that we've had to do and really engineering around that to really figure out innovatively how to do that becomes very straightforward, radiative cooling, simply kind of extending the radiative cooling solutions that we're doing with Starlink and now doing it with AI compute. And then obviously, no land lease to deal with. And so really, it then becomes your cost is your satellite and your launch. And I look at it being a tech person because I was semiconductors before space, you kind of have those cost curves traditionally that you would have, right? And as you ramp up in volume and time, your costs go down and you're benefiting from Moore's Law or maybe soon the different type of Moore's Law.
But if you look at the satellite, most of the cost is silicon, right? And so we're ramping up factories, and we're benefiting from silicon cost reductions, process node to process node. So our costs are going to go down over the next few years. If you look at the terrestrial solutions, the curve is going the other direction, right? Everything is getting more expensive, right? The way you're doing the cooling, power bills are not going down and land/regulatory is getting more and more challenging. And so I think this just all lends to better for the population and a trajectory to be significantly better from a cost perspective as well.
Awesome. And how do you think like this market, compute is one of the largest markets in the world today. How do you think about the size of that market when you will enter it -- and we'll talk about terrestrial compute. But when you will enter kind of like begin to have orbital compute working and maybe a range. This is really hard stuff.
Yes, it is. In fact, my engineers, they've heard me explain where it's kind of a logical transition, and we've done most of the thesis of this already. They say, you got to -- you got to make sure people understand there's a lot of work still to do. I said, I understand that. And some of that is actually scaling this. Scaling to the numbers that we're talking about such that you can put up gigawatts a year in space is a very hard challenge. And we have just been able to demonstrate scale, whether it's launch scale or whether it's flying and building ourselves thousands of satellites a year.
And that is definitely going to be one of the challenges here again that we deal with here. But certainly, we're going to be able to demonstrate capabilities as soon as next year. And so it is near. And I think the ones that say, we believe, like if you list kind of the people that are supporting orbital compute solutions at this point, it's basically a who's who of the tech/AI industry. I won't list other people's names, but certainly, Elon Musk will be at the top of that list, right? But I think they think that it's a lot further away because you can't do it without launch, right, without the rapid reusable launch that Starship is going to provide.
I will ask Grok a question, Grok being SpaceX's AI, general purpose AI. I'll ask Grok a question. The inference will happen on an orbital compute satellite and come down via Starlink Direct-to-Cell to my cell phone.
And will be amazing.
What a moment -- and whenever it happens, like I will personally find that very exciting.
I completely agree. Yes.
And then can we just kind of like conceptualize the scale of this? Because I think people -- megawatts, gigawatts -- like I think there's one -- there's maybe a few now, but there's only a few gigawatt scale data centers here on planet earth today -- operate one of them [indiscernible] together. But like give us a sense of the scale of a gigawatt data center and how much power that is relative to the -- I think a single Blackwell rack consumes the power of 100 American homes, and we're putting in a gigawatt scale data center, hundreds of these racks together and stitching them together. So just what does it mean gigawatts of orbital compute per year? And I don't think your boss is going to be satisfied at gigawatts.
He is not, nor am I. And I think that's why you see us spending so much time to get Starship to rapid reuse. Right now, with the existing first iteration of our satellite and our V3 version of Starship we just flew, it's roughly 200 launches for every gigawatt that we put up. And I would just emphasize that's first gen of the satellite and the rocket. And so we are just starting down this path. But even at that point, we're capacitizing for thousands of launches a year right now. And you see the 2 launch towers and pads in South Texas. You see the first one almost done at Cape Canaveral and the second one on its way with Launch Complex 37 within the next year. And so those first 4 towers alone kind of give you that initial path, and we've got other locations that we're starting to talk about, too. And so I think that is critical to start down the path of having that capacitization as the rocket itself starts to ramp.
Awesome. I would love to talk -- before we talk about your AI business, [Johnsen] said that bringing Colossus I, which was the largest coherent cluster of Hoppers in the world online in 122 days, and these are [Johnsen] words, was super human in that he thought only Elon could have done it. Elon and the talented team that works with him. And I would just love to hear from you, what is it like working for Elon?
And how does Elon being so involved in the engineering plus this incredible sense of mission play into the talent of the company. Why could xAI now part of SpaceX do something like I vividly remember, a lot of people thought it was impossible and that it couldn't be done, and it wasn't being exaggerated. And I think it wasn't until [Johnsen] had said that, that people believed it had been done because it seemed so impossible. So just talk about working for Elon and the talent and...
Yes. I mean I've got 15 years working for him. It's always special. It's one of the reasons I'm still here, to be honest with you. He creates a culture where like we talked about where you set out with these -- what initially looked like audacious goals, and then step by step, you realize that you're marching towards something that is absolutely achievable. The schedules themselves are sometimes challenging to make as far as the initial schedule. But what's amazing is he does everything that he sets out to do. And I think that's the key here is -- in fact, if I think about going to Mars, for example, when I first got here in 2011, 15 years ago, people would be kind of like rolling their eyes when we talk about Mars and being a multi-planetary species.
Nowadays, when we say that, literally, the response is what year. It's no longer -- it doesn't even sound audacious. And I think what Elon, done a masterful job on is along with probably a lot of other things, is setting out these targets and then creating a fantastic business model around each piece of IP that you need for that end goal. It reminded me of when back when I was at Broadcom, we would go in and we want to do a new SoC. And if we were missing pieces of IP, we would do an acquisition, right? And you grab those pieces in because you want to win the next socket at wherever Apple or something. And here, if we need the next piece of IP, we're doing it organically for sure. But it was -- we got to get to orbit, then we need reusable rockets, then we need heavy lift with Falcon Heavy and now Starship. We want NAND carriage, right?
So now Dragon and now Starship. And then we need comms in space. And so you kind of go step by step by step and then you need rapid reusable launch. And once you have that, you get to the point if you're flying thousands of times a year, when a Mars window opens, you have a fleet of vehicles that you're ready to launch to for that month or so, and then you're back to your operational cadence again, right, because it's every 2 years. And you didn't really have to have a crazy investment to make that capability happen anymore. And now it's, hey, let's get the lunar economy going. Let's learn what it is to live in space, knowing that we're going to want those capabilities for the moon and then Mars as well.
And so I think that kind of step at a time has kind of removed any concerns that people initially had of how are you going to raise all this money for something and what's the business model around multiplanetary species -- and now people don't worry about that. And so we all get to stay here focused on the mission and yet the business model itself is pretty amazing. And I think you start to see that same dynamic happening with AI. where we're going to leverage this capability, it's going to ramp up our launch capability along the way. I think it's going to absolutely give us an extension to our mission related to bringing the human consciousness off planet, right, and preserving that consciousness in space, and yet it's a great business model for us step by step.
Just double-clicking on the talent and the engineering environment that Elon creates that goes into making each one of these pieces of the business, IP around it. Each element of Starship, each element of Starlink is kind of -- to me, there's many interesting pieces of engineering. But like what I always think about and just in terms of just kind of making sure everyone understands the culture of SpaceX is my understanding is Elon works on whatever is in the critical path whatever the hardest problem is directly with the engineers. So we have a mission, making humanity multiPlanetary. We have other AI missions that we'll talk about. So this is really exciting. We get the world's best engineers.
And then my observation is, I think, an underappreciated part of what Elon does is -- to me, if I talk to any engineer, one of their favorite times in life was that like college engineering course where they had -- were assigned on a team and they had to build like a remote controlled drone or a race car, and they worked all night. And it feels to me like that is what Elon creates for these exceptional engineers that are brought in by the mission, and just I don't know what -- you would know better than me, but I believe at one point, the raptor engine was like the critical gating factor. And there was a standing meeting every late Sunday or Monday night, and it just had to be the engineers who are working on the raptor engine. And maybe they're just 24 years old, but they're there in the small room working on that problem. Can you just talk about that environment?
I mean I think we've seen that type of dynamic a handful of times for sure. And you're exactly right. I think what's amazing to me is that he is in there in the details, working with the engineers on these critical issues. And it's also incredibly inspiring to know that your leader is in the trenches with you and working probably harder than any employee that I know, and I don't know how he keeps that energy level up for the length of the decades literally that he's been able to do it. It's pretty amazing. But I absolutely would tell you, I witnessed those technical challenges -- or technical discussions over the challenges that we face on a regular basis. Raptor engine was one of them for sure, but there have been many others along the way. And he's going toe to toe with the technical leaders on those items. And it's just incredibly inspiring.
And now we have that photographic evolution from Raptor 1 to Raptor 3 and now it seems like all the Raptors did great on the latest Starship.
They did. It's pretty amazing.
Yes. But so the first mission that SpaceX started with was make humanity multiplanetary. I think it now has other missions because you acquired xAI, whose mission was maximally truth-seeking AI; xAI had which is dedicated to free speech. And I think these are -- these missions resonate with people. And then maybe these all come together and I've heard expanding the light cone of consciousness, bringing the light of consciousness to the stars. This is kind of the overarching mission now that ties them all together. So I would just love -- I would love to hear from you, Bret, how you think about the AI business, and then we'll rip on some of it.
Listen, I appreciate it. I think that going into the AI business has a couple of different incredibly rewarding elements. Certainly, there's a financial opportunity and there's the opportunity to give us the reason to really ramp up to thousands of launches from a financial perspective. But I think it's also critical that we have the ability to make sure that the AI model that people start to really rely upon is a true seeking model. And so having the content, the real live content from X integrated into our solution, I think is important to us, and I think will, in the end, be a huge differentiator related to our AI solutions.
Awesome. Well, let's talk about the business. And the first part of the business that I think is probably most accessible to people is Grok. We've got Grok. We have an enterprise API business. We now have Grok Build, which puts a harness around it. We have terrestrial compute here on earth. And like let's just -- let's walk through each of them.
Well, it's probably not a surprise that we have a very diversified AI business because we've done the same thing with our other businesses. If I think back to our space business, the fact that we launched commercial missions and Space Force missions and NASA missions really gives us diversification. And then you look at connectivity with broadband and direct to sell and the fact within broadband, we didn't even talk about enterprise and government, but that's certainly a big piece of our broadband business as well. And so now you talk about AI and again, a very diversified business. Certainly, hosting others was a key item that we talked about related to in the next couple of years with orbital compute. But there's nothing better to prove out that business model than demonstrating it right now with the Anthropic deal that we announced.
We can do that right now with our terrestrial data centers. So certainly hosting others as well as building our own model, both enterprise and consumer, to your point, certainly, on the consumer side, the differentiation of our real-time data from X is huge. By the way, even X, I think we can do far better related to the optimization of the ads engine. We're investing in that technology right now. And you saw us not be happy with where we were at on the enterprise solution, on the coding specifically.
And so we went out and did the deal with Cursor and brought in one of the industry-leading solutions even on that front to move us faster and bring in all of that enterprise data. So I think in all of those areas, you're seeing huge strides already. But what I also love is that it's now SpaceX AI. If you go up there at Palo Alto, it is SpaceX. And you feel it already, you're seeing the impact of that, bringing our DNA and integrating the 2 companies as fast as possible has been really special. And I think you're just in the early days of seeing what we're going to do in AI.
Yes. I mean just actually, the rate of product releases has accelerated significantly. I do want to kind of double-click on this Anthropic deal. And with the Anthropic deal that you -- that has been signed and reported on, you're at a $3.75 billion run rate per quarter. So you are 50% larger than the company that I think of as being just outside the top 4. And so you have a top 5 AI infrastructure business by my math, and that's just -- that's my neck in math. But can you just talk about that deal, what that was like and how many more deals like that there could be and how quickly we can bring on terrestrial compute now that we have confidence there's offtake.
Yes. I think that just -- there's nothing better than just demonstrating the capability even before we get to space that we feel like we're bringing a solution to the AI industry that's desperately needed. I think Elon was very vocal even a year ago that he felt like the constraint was going to be compute and power, and you're already seeing that. And what we have is we have these dense training clusters, which makes it really premium compute that we're able to offer folks as well. But I don't want to also give people the sense that, that means we're backing off related to our own internal solutions. We're absolutely not. But the fact that we can keep our model and our solutions training and doing inference on the bleeding edge related to GB 300s in this particular case and really monetize the other compute in our terrestrial data centers is huge.
And I think you're going to see us be able to do more of that ideally with more folks over the next whatever time period we want to give it here even before we get to space. And that's really been part of the key. I mean we, at our core, are builders, right? We are strongly entrenched in building the infrastructure of the future. And so AI being one of those key industries. And so I think that you'll see likely more and more folks want to lean to us. There's just a tremendous amount of technical challenge in putting up these, like, to your point, gigawatt scale data centers.
So we should expect to see you guys ramp up the expansion of terrestrial data centers to support third parties who want to rid compute from you and for your own internal services.
Exactly.
Well, on Grok, would love to talk about that. Would love to talk about what Cursor could mean for the Grok business. And one thing that really made an impression on me is the very significant leap in Cursor's own internal model composer after just a few weeks of mid-training, reinforcement learning in the SpaceX AI Colossus II cluster. And you saw a pretty -- you saw just factually a noticeable jump in performance, and it is on the Pareto frontier for -- that measures cost relative to kind of intelligence. So this is effectively intelligence per unit of cost. Just talk about Cursor, talk about Grok, talk about where that business could go.
Well, it's a really great team, first and foremost, when we were doing the diligence and talking to Michael Truell and team. I think you know when you find a team that's a good cultural fit. And so once that was identified, then looking at the data that they were able to bring to the table for us, that was huge. The fact that they're working with over half the Fortune 500 and have thousands of enterprise accounts was certainly a huge opportunity. And then for them, they -- to your point, they were starved for compute, and you saw immediately what the benefit was for their tool. And so now having that cursor coding engine as well as our own Grok LLM and really the harness with Grok Build that's coming out really right now, it's pretty magical.
Awesome. And I would love to -- just a few words about Terafab, so just talk about Terafab and how the company is thinking about that.
Yes. I think Terafab is a really interesting one, being a semiconductor guy before we were talking about. And certainly, it's a partnership, first and foremost, with SpaceX and Tesla. And so now bringing in Intel into the fold it's huge, right? Having an industry leader of decades in the semiconductor industry brings that know-how to the table. I look at it as if you were starting up a foundry business from scratch, I just -- I think it would be so challenging to convince people to tape out their products to you. And so I don't even know that you could start a new company from scratch unless you had a captive customer like in this scenario, like SpaceX and Tesla saying, we will take every wafer that you can yield out. And so then it takes that risk away.
And then really, the risk is a capital risk only. And so I also think that there are going to be some very exciting elements of having, in my view, the entrepreneur innovator of our lifetime going and challenging the requirements in a new industry again, and sitting with the process engineers that have 50 steps to their requirements list and pushing on each one related to why that has to exist that way and bringing everything under one roof and taking a completely different approach, I think will yield a pretty amazing result, and Elon has been able to demonstrate that industry after industry after industry. But what I would say is we are doing this because we're very concerned about the supply chain constraints that might exist very soon in the next handful of years related to being able to fab out anywhere else.
If you look at it, when you start talking about NVIDIA or the AI chip or a TPU, all of a sudden, you start talking about TSMC, right? And so it isn't that you're being able to diversify out from a supply chain perspective if you go one more layer down. And so our concern is really more than anything else that the supply chain won't be there for us to ramp to many, many gigawatts, ideally 100 gigawatts a year is our target in the years to come without being able to have a terra fab. We need to make sure that we have assured supply of silicon.
And I would just say as an American, it's awesome to have more semiconductor manufacturing in America. It's awesome to have more manufacturing jobs here in America being created by SpaceX. And I'm sure you and everyone are super proud of that, but it's great for the country. So thank you. Maybe last question. SpaceX has been very capital efficient over the course of its life. But now we are -- we have Terafab, Starship, orbital compute. We're going to start putting a lot more capital both into the ground and into space in the most literal way. And can you talk about that transition? And can you talk about how it's going to be funded?
Yes. I think that really capital allocation has been one of the bigger challenges of this job for 15 years. And what I would just say is, we have a pretty good track record. right, of being able to do this. And certainly, the dollars are now bigger than they have been in the past. But I also am incredibly proud of the value creation along the way that we have already been able to achieve. And I think that track record also is something that people should consider when they're thinking about the future for us as well. But we really take an approach from a capital allocation, similar to what you would do in a just-in-time model for manufacturing.
You're looking to capacitize starship with different towers and air separation units for the fuel and additional hangers. And so you're looking at that, you're looking at whole new facilities for satellite builds and solar capability. And now you're looking at terrestrial data centers and orbital compute, all happening at the same time. And so you really have to go map it out quarter-by-quarter and just not get ahead of yourselves related to when do I need that capacity in each of these businesses.
And the timing, one might think there was some sound business logic and minds that work here because the timing does seem to work out really well with Starship starting to fly, Starlink V3 that enables -- that unlocks growth for Starlink and growth for Starlink is cash flows because it's a cash-generative business. That unlocks Direct-to-Cell, which is a new business that will presumably be high margins. And all that is coming online and ramping right when orbital compute when we need to start putting a lot of those racks into space.
That's right. That's right. I wish I could take credit for that, but that's certainly Elon. I just -- I execute on the man's incredible vision, but I agree with you the timing is pretty magic.
Well, Elon would say execution is everything and vision is a distant, distant, distant execution. So execution is important. But I also just think maybe to kind of bring us home, but we have Starship launch that enables everything. We have terrestrial compute gigawatt scale data centers. We have an AI model. We have Starlink. We have Orbital compute, and we have Terafab. And all of these play into each other and work together. And can you just -- can you just talk about what that enables? And just it is -- it's a lot of vertical integration.
It is. And I think when people look at it from the outside, they think about all these kind of disparate businesses, but it's actually not that at all. It is the fact that we have a launch platform that was Falcon and now is about to be Falcon and Starship that really is the enablement for every business you just listed. And so we get to just go get better and better at that core launch capability, that core DNA of being the space business of the world. And each of these vertical offshoots comes to play out where you have a differentiation because of the fact you're able to deliver a better product because of it -- it's coming from space. And it's different versions of satellites in most cases or it is back to our core of being incredibly vertically integrated in each of these core pieces of the business and really bringing infrastructure to the forefront in each of these.
And at every level, competitors can buy launch from SpaceX. Starlink is available to everyone. You're selling compute terrestrially to competitors. The model can be used by anyone. So while it's vertically integrated in orbital compute, Elon has said that competitors are welcome. So while the model is vertically integrated, it is also open at each level for and can be accessed discretely. And then, of course, if each one of these elements is a stand-alone business on its own, that just gives you more scale, further lowers costs, plays into the vertical integration.
That's right. Yes, exciting times.
Exciting times.
SpaceX — Special Call - Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
SpaceX presented Starship as the pivot to radically lower launch costs and unlock massive Starlink growth, Direct‑to‑Cell and orbital AI compute.
📊 Key Message
- Takeaway: Starship rapid reusability is presented as the core enabler — ~100 metric‑ton lifts and a targeted ~10x cost‑per‑kg improvement versus Falcon — to scale Starlink to hundreds of millions, launch racks‑in‑space for AI inference/training, expand terrestrial/orbital compute and secure supply via a new fab.
🎯 Strategic Highlights
- Launch: Starship aims for aircraft‑like rapid reusability; recent V3 flight validated full‑system hardware and new Raptor engines.
- Connectivity: Starlink: 10M+ customers, 10k+ satellites; roadmap to Direct‑to‑Cell (global 5G‑quality roaming) and further broadband scale.
- Compute: "Racks in space" concept using GPU racks, solar arrays and radiative cooling; Terafab to secure silicon and Anthropic/terrestrial deals to monetize now.
🔭 New Information
- Proof points: Last week’s V3 launch demonstrated system operations and soft splashdown; management says second‑stage reuse in the next couple years could drive the cited ~10x cost gains.
- Scale signals: Internal math: ~200 launches per gigawatt with current gen; Anthropic deal and cited $3.75B run‑rate per quarter noted as material offtake; new towers/pads being added.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Timelines: Management optimistic — "next couple of years" for rapid reuse and "as soon as next year" demos for orbital compute — but provided few firm milestones or per‑launch cost figures.
- Scaling challenges: Questions focused on how to reach gigawatt/year orbital compute (launch cadence, satellite production, cooling/power) and the heavy manufacturing ramp required.
- Capital allocation: CFO described a phased, quarter‑by‑quarter capacity build (towers, data centers, fab) but declined to give precise capex or funding targets now.
⚡ Bottom Line
SpaceX pitched an integrated ecosystem where Starship lowers launch costs, Starlink scales revenue, terrestrial deals fund near‑term compute, and Terafab secures silicon — de‑risking the orbital compute vision but raising capital intensity. Investors should track Starship reusability progress, Starlink monetization (Direct‑to‑Cell) and Terafab execution for validation.
SpaceX — Special Call - Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
1. Management Discussion
Hi. I'm Bret Johnsen, Chief Financial Officer of SpaceX for the last 15 years. Only one the company has ever had actually. And it's a pleasure to talk with you about SpaceX.
Elon started SpaceX with the goal to change mankind and make it a multiplanetary species. And what's been very exciting is we've been able to expand that mission with our Starlink constellation as well as with our AI solutions.
At our core, we're really builders. We're the only company building the integrated hardware and software infrastructure to really power multiple businesses. But we started back in 2002 at our roots as a space business.
We achieve what others think is really the impossible and we make that possible. If you look at some of the milestones that we have accomplished already in the space business, we're the first private company to develop and launch a liquid fuel rocket and reach orbit back in 2008 with the Falcon 1. We're then the first private company to successfully dock a spacecraft for the International Space Station in 2012. The first to successfully propulsively land a rocket from space, specifically the first-stage booster, back in 2015; and refly an orbital class rocket booster in 2017. The first private company to launch astronauts to orbit and fly to the International Space Station in 2020.
We are the first to have really a fleet of rockets that end with reusability, and drive from Falcon reusability today of the first stage to full reusability with Starship. 23 metric tons of capability with Falcon 9, going to 64 metric tons of capability with Falcon Heavy, to now about to be 100 metric tons with the Version 3 of Starship.
And really from a rocket reuse perspective, that has been the unlock mechanism. It's really driven down the cost of launch and given us the ability to drive up launch cadence, specifically having a hangar full of rockets to show our launch customers or having the ability to ramp to, just last year alone, 165 launches of our Falcon 9, and now moving into fully reusable with Starship.
Starship really has an unparalleled capability from a cost efficiency perspective. If you look at where this industry has been historically and where we were able to get to with just first-stage reuse on the Falcon class where we were able to drive out 85% of the historic costs, now we're looking at a vehicle that's intended to go drive a 10x improvement even from where we were already industry-leading with Falcon.
Along with the unlock from a cost perspective, Starship also gives us an unlock from a throughput perspective. So you see it with Falcon 9 in the expendable category, let alone Falcon Heavy at 64 metric tons going to 100 metric tons with Version 3 and then already starting to work on Version 4 in the design that should double that again to 200 metric tons to orbit.
We talk about the mission and, certainly, how we accomplish the mission. One of the reasons that we're able to do this is we run what Elon calls The Algorithm. And The Algorithm starts with, first and foremost, making the requirements less dumb. Questioning requirements is a key piece of our culture. We then move into deleting parts and process steps. And you see that, as an example in the picture here where you have the first version of the Raptor engine on the left going all the way to Raptor 3. And then once you delete the parts and the process step, you move into optimization, acceleration and automation.
And then pivoting to the connectivity business. Again, the connectivity business is really enabled by our core launch capabilities. We have now launched and operate a high-speed, low-latency global broadband constellation, otherwise known as Starlink. And really we feel Starlink is an unrivaled satellite constellation.
The V2 satellites that we fly today on Falcon deliver 96 gigabits per second per satellite, and we fly roughly 27 satellites per launch. But the V3 satellites we're about to fly in the back half of this year are a huge step function in capability. In fact, per launch on a Falcon today with the V2 satellite to the Version 3 satellites, it's a 20x improvement related to the capacity per launch with Version 3.
And in fact, that translates into, with 60 satellites flying per launch on Starship and each of them delivering roughly 1 terabit per second, that we will be able to fly 61 terabits per second of downlink capability per launch of Starship coming up here. What that quickly translates into is, after 20 launches of Starship, we will be launching 1.2 petabytes of capacity per year. When you start talking about in petabytes, you start actually looking at the Starlink network as a percentage of global Internet traffic.
It's also important to note that because of the fact that we're delivering from space, we're able to deliver in many areas and in many cases where terrestrial just can't deliver, whether it's low-density populated areas, whether it's very remote areas, whether it's in very challenging topography where you just couldn't handle it from a terrestrial perspective, or on the mobility side, in the air, on the ocean. And we've been able to demonstrate over and over again being able to bring capabilities in services and communication to areas in a disaster zone.
We have the world's largest satellite Internet network, roughly over 9,600 satellites. You look at all the others combined, and they're a fraction of what our constellation is. We're actually representing 75% of all active maneuverable satellites in orbit at this point.
And our user base is significantly expanding. So we ended 2024 with roughly 4.4 million users. End of last year, we had roughly doubled year-over-year the number of users to roughly 8.9 million. And now as of the end of Q1, approximately 10.3 million users on our network. Over 100% year-over-year growth. Over 164 countries/territories, that represents over 3 billion people, being covered by our network. And as more and more companies and industries look to resiliency and reliability as critical capabilities, you're starting to see Starlink being brought in as either the primary or at least the backup solution in a lot of the fixed side as well.
Aviation specifically I have to call out because there's a tremendous amount of traction. You see an announcement almost every week now related to another airline talking about Starlink adoption. And then also on the government side of the business, delivering Starshield capabilities, a whole separate constellation, for the U.S. government. Again, resiliency being critical here in delivering core capabilities.
And then the other piece of our very diversified connectivity offering is direct-to-the-handset. So direct-to-device, we started out with our Gen 1 solution, which was really a proof of concept. We flew 650 satellites, turned on the service with 30 different mobile network operators around the world, the largest being T-Mobile in the United States. Have coverage now for 1.9 billion people, and have proved that there's certainly a demand and excitement about having this capability.
We now are in work to fly our Gen 2. This is full 5G quality to your phone. I think this will be the transformational unlock of connecting the other 3 billion people on the planet that had really been left out from the digital divide.
And then lastly, our AI business. It is really exciting to talk about where we're at from an AI perspective. Because this is again following that same, repeatable business model that I talked about, leveraging that unrivaled launch capability. We looked at following down the same path that we had done with the other businesses and really owning the full value chain all the way to the end customer; what made the most sense is for us to have our own frontier model and be able to capture all of that value. And so that's exactly what we did.
We now have the world's largest coherent supercomputer with the Colossus 2 data center that we stood up with best-in-class compute GB300 specifically from NVIDIA. We have the first gigawatt-scale training cluster, the first gigawatt-scale Megapack battery installation there as well, and first to deploy the GB200 and 300s at significant scale. And so having a gigawatt of nameplate compute draw is really compelling for us.
But certainly, I want to talk about the orbital AI compute that's coming in the next couple of years because this seems to be the future of AI infrastructure. And this is the clean energy solution. This is the solution that really addresses some of the concerns related to AI data centers popping up. The distribution capability that others may think is the constraint related to this, we've already demonstrated with our Starlink network today.
And having, in essence, no operating cost, because you're leveraging the power of the sun, and cooling, it's radiative cooling off the satellite, makes this readily available and incredibly cost efficient. And so we are ramping up this capability right now, and in essence leveraging a ton of capability that we already have in place, whether it's the ion propulsion thrusters, whether it's the inter-satellite laser links between the satellites or the flight computer or reaction wheels. Again, a lot of technology that otherwise would be blockers to doing this in the near term, we have in place. It's why we feel like we are the only company that can do this in any meaningful time frame.
And what matters related to AI infrastructure is really creating that business model where if you start at the very top and leverage that connectivity capability that we have to drive that infrastructure advantage for us, we then get to go right into the cycle of leveraging that, driving improved quality of intelligence, and lowering the cost at the same time of our token cost, monetizing that and driving that reinvestment back into that cycle of infrastructure.
We've certainly demonstrated our capability to go monetize this infrastructure with key partners in the industry. For example, we signed a deal with Anthropic just recently to give them access and host their model on our data center, while at the same time allowing us to make investments in our own model, with an example of that being the deal that we announced with Cursor related to improving our own coding capability on our compute resources. So continuing down the path of monetization and leveraging our, what we believe is best-in-class in the industry, deployment of cutting-edge compute, and at the same time continuing to invest in our own models to even further that monetization in the future.
I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the fact that we believe one of our differentiators related to our models is certainly the fact that we are designing them as advanced truth-seeking AI from the very beginning. It's certainly one of the reasons that Elon got into the AI business to begin with, is to have that really truth-seeking model.
We certainly are also going to leverage the X platform that we have in place now, that really brings us real-time information. Real-time data is, I think, critical at all times, and I don't know that there's a better place to get real-time data than on X.
So our growth strategy starts with space, increasing our launch payloads, getting to full reusability from Starship perspective and certainly over time opens up whole new markets in the space industry. But what it immediately does is it enables our connectivity business to grow meaningfully, and now AI as well, where it's not just growth of our own platform on the infrastructure side, it also allows us to start hosting others and building out that piece of our AI business model.
So there's almost $6 trillion of available market that we're going after, really in 3 pieces. We are moving faster and cheaper than others in the industry even related to deploying terrestrial compute. And we think over time, the enterprise AI market is massive. So an incredibly large total addressable market that we're going after, over $28 trillion.
Not only are we positioned for those markets today, but I think it's exciting to talk about where some of the future growth beyond that really is even happening. And certainly, when you start talking about space, we start to talk about point-to-point transportation terrestrially, manufacturing or productivity, potentially asteroid mining in the future.
And I think very exciting also is the lunar economy. The fact that we're on track in the next couple of years to put boots back on the moon, being able to build out sustainable capabilities on the moon, I think in the years to come will be a tremendous unlock for, really, for humanity.
We feel like we've had a stellar track record already related to capital allocation and value creation. If you look at even in the life of the company from a space and connectivity business, the fact that we really only raised $9 billion and have created the business that we now have today, with last year alone generating $7.8 billion in positive adjusted EBITDA while also investing for the future with another $3.6 billion of R&D just last year alone, I think clearly we have demonstrated both on the capital allocation side and value creation that this is what we're all about.
And what that means from a financial perspective on top line, revenue has continued to grow meaningfully year after year after year. In fact, in '25 alone, over 30% growth year-over-year, just as we were starting to ramp, in essence, in the connectivity business. In generating that roughly $19 billion in revenue, also generated almost $7 billion in positive adjusted EBITDA just last year alone. And then in the connectivity business portion, you can see the significant step-up, where we grew roughly 50% in 2025 year-over-year.
And then as far as building the infrastructure of the future, that typically takes capital. And so we are not alone in investing meaningfully in CapEx, especially in the AI side of the business now. And that's been the lion's share of the CapEx deployment for the last 2 years now that we have consolidated in our AI business into the fold here, where just last year alone, roughly $21 billion of CapEx, but a large percentage of that was for AI. And you're already seeing us monetizing a decent amount of that with the hosting deal that we just announced on the Anthropic side.
And then on the financials for Q1, we delivered roughly $5 billion of top line just in the first quarter. The connectivity segment alone was a highlight with roughly $3 billion of that revenue just in Q1. But if you look at where we think we will be in the longer term, our future model, we think that our revenue growth will be even significantly higher than that year-over-year. We think our gross margins are more like 70%, and that our GAAP net income margin is more like 45%. And so we're very excited about where we're ramping into related to the profitability of the business and yet the significant growth that we believe we're marching towards.
And so lastly, why do we think we're going to win? I think it starts, first and foremost, with our global leadership position in orbital launch services. We have an unrivaled satellite and connectivity platform that really leverages vertical integration from design, manufacturing, deployment and operations, and now really truth-seeking AI models enhanced by real-time data from our X platform. That extreme vertical integration really enables high-velocity and superior cost efficiency at scale.
And really, the business models are incredibly difficult to replicate, right? Because of the fact that at the core, you first have to have that global leadership position in orbital launch. And so that unique ability to scale into new trillion-dollar markets across space, connectivity and AI is certainly a reason that we think we're going to win and continue to be this mission-driven culture that is enabled by our world-class talent.
Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.
SpaceX — Special Call - Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
SpaceX framed a unified growth story: Starship-driven launch scale funds a massive Starlink capacity jump and an orbital AI compute business.
📊 Key Message
- Takeaway: SpaceX presented an integrated flywheel: achieve full reusability with Starship to cut launch costs and increase cadence, use that lift to multiply Starlink capacity (V3 + Starship), and monetize hosted and orbital AI compute—leveraging vertical integration and real‑time data from X.
🎯 Strategic Highlights
- Launch/Starship: Starship targets ~100t payload (Version 3) scaling toward 200t (future Version 4) and an intended ~10x cost improvement vs Falcon-class reuse to enable much higher launch cadence.
- Starlink: Fleet ~9,600 satellites; V2 = 96 Gbps per sat; V3 ~20x per-launch capacity; ~10.3M users end‑Q1 with rapid traction in aviation, government (Starshield) and direct‑to‑handset (Gen2 5G).
- AI infrastructure: Colossus 2 gigawatt-scale data center using NVIDIA GB200/300 gear; hosting deals (Anthropic, Cursor); roadmap for orbital AI compute powered by solar and inter-satellite links.
🔭 New Information
- New: Q1 revenue ~ $5B with connectivity ~ $3B; end‑Q1 Starlink users ~10.3M. Company-stated long‑term targets: gross margins ~70% and GAAP net income margin ~45%. 2025 CapEx cited ~ $21B (large share for AI); concrete hosting monetization underway.
⚡ Bottom Line
SpaceX is selling a high‑reward, capital‑intensive plan: if Starship execution and Starlink scaling work, the company can dominate launch, connectivity and differentiated AI hosting with very high margins; key risks are technical rollout, heavy CapEx and execution timing.
Financial data from SpaceX
Revenue
Revenue is the sum of all sales generated by a company, e.g. for its products or services.
Revenue (TTM) metric explainedDirect Costs
Direct costs are the costs incurred directly in connection with the manufacture of the product or service.
Gross Profit
Gross Profit indicates how much of the revenue remains in the company after deducting direct production costs. If the percentage share of sales is calculated, this is referred to as the gross margin.
Gross Profit metric explainedSelling and Administrative Expenses
Selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A) include all expenses for marketing and sales as well as the general administration of the company.
Research and Development Expense
Research and development costs (R&D) provide information on how much the company invests in the research and development of its products. The costs are particularly interesting as a percentage of revenue and in comparison to direct competitors.
EBITDA
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) is the company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The EBITDA margin is calculated as a percentage of sales.
Depreciation and Amortization
Depreciation represents reductions in the value of the company's assets (e.g. due to wear and tear on machinery).
EBIT (Operating Income)
EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) is the company's profit before interest and taxes, also known as the operating income. The EBIT Margin is calculated as a percentage of sales at
.
Net Profit
Net Profit represents the profit or loss after deduction of all costs.
Net Profit metric explainedStocksGuide Premium
| Jun '26 |
+/-
%
|
||
| Revenue | 31,182 31,182 |
-
100%
|
|
| - Direct Costs | 15,334 15,334 |
-
49%
|
|
| Gross Profit | 15,848 15,848 |
-
51%
|
|
| - Selling and Administrative Expenses | 4,366 4,366 |
-
14%
|
|
| - Research and Development Expense | 15,705 15,705 |
-
50%
|
|
| EBITDA | 4,798 4,798 |
-
15%
|
|
| - Depreciation and Amortization | 9,021 9,021 |
-
29%
|
|
| EBIT (Operating Income) EBIT | -4,223 -4,223 |
-
-14%
|
|
| Net Profit | -10,425 -10,425 |
-
-33%
|
|
In millions USD.
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SpaceX Stock News
Company Profile
SpaceX is an integrated aerospace, space transportation, and satellite communications company focused on reducing the cost of access to space and enabling humanity’s long-term expansion beyond Earth. The company designs, manufactures, launches, and operates advanced rockets, spacecraft, and satellite systems. Its core business includes reusable launch services through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, human and cargo transportation through Dragon, global satellite internet through Starlink, and the development of Starship, a fully reusable next-generation launch system designed for large-scale missions to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Today, SpaceX serves commercial, government, defense, scientific, and consumer markets. Its launch business provides reliable access to orbit for satellites, cargo, crewed missions, and rideshare payloads. Starlink expands the company’s role from space transportation into global connectivity by delivering high-speed, low-latency broadband internet, especially in remote, underserved, maritime, aviation, and mobile environments. xAI is a frontier artificial intelligence company focused on building advanced AI systems that accelerate human scientific discovery and help humanity better understand the universe. Now operating as a division of SpaceX, xAI develops and commercializes Grok, a family of AI models and products designed for reasoning, real-time search, voice interaction, coding, file analysis, image and video generation, and enterprise automation. xAI also owns the social media platform X.
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| Head office | United States |
| Website | www.spacex.com |


