SpaceX Stock

Hello, everyone. We are coming to you live from our Starlink factory and future Starmind production site here in Bastrop, Texas. I'm Andrea Williams, Head of Investor Relations, and thank you for joining us for SpaceX's Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Presentation.

Joining us are Elon, Gwynne, and Bret, and we are live streaming on X. Our third quarter financial results were announced just after 3:00 p.m. Texas time, and all relevant materials have been published to our Investor Relations website at ir.spacex.com. For today's presentation, 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 polled on our dedicated earnings Q&A platform, which the SpaceX team built with Grok.

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 earnings release and the most recent filings with the SEC, including our final prospectus. During the presentation, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. In today's earnings release and our filings with the SEC, you can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including all of the reconciliations with comparable GAAP measures. For the third quarter of 2026, we announced the following financial results as compared to the prior year period. revenues of $14.6 billion, up 161% from $5.6 billion; net income of $4.4 billion, an improvement of $5.5 billion from a net loss of $1.1 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 billion, up 306% from $2.2 billion.

With that, I'll hand the call over to Elon.

Thank you. So we are in an inflection moment for SpaceX across launch connectivity and Super Intelligence. Starting with Starship, Flight 14 was a critical milestone. Starship made it to orbit for the first time and deployed operational Starlink V3 satellites. I think we have a recap video we're going to play.

[Presentation]

All right. For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we're going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship. This will be the -- if we succeed, it will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered. This is a massive technology milestone. The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is -- I think this is a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization consciousness. So let's look at what simulation of Flight 15 would look like if we succeed. If we don't succeed in Flight 15, we'll get there. So success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight. And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year and then accelerating next year. So with that, the Flight 15 simulation.

[Presentation]

We've also announced the development of the Louisiana spaceport. So that's going to be an incredible asset to the country and to the world that will, I think, at some point, probably have on the order of 20 or more launch towers and enable the transport of millions of tonnes per year to orbit and beyond. So that's really going to be a big deal.

We expect Starship to fly weekly at some point in the first half next year and then second half next year, twice weekly or maybe even more frequently than that by the end of next year. The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve the rapid and complete reusability. So we'll have complete reusability. Then at first, there will be a little bit of refurbishment that's needed between each flight, and we'll iron out the need for any refurbishment such that you can immediately land the rocket and launch it again just like an airplane. As I said, this is a profound technology milestone that most people in the world don't realize how important it is, but it will be obvious in hindsight.

Starlink is also just getting started. Flight 14 deployed 26 terabits per second of Starlink bandwidth. That's equivalent to 10 Falcon 9 launches. So a single starship launch, which wasn't even fully loaded. It was about maybe half loaded, and it did the equivalent of 10 Falcon 9 launches. So what I expect over time is, not in the distant future, probably within three years is that we will have about 100x the bandwidth of the current Starlink constellation. So because we will have launched satellites with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, and we will place into orbit an order of magnitude more Starlink satellites. So probably something on the order of 100,000 satellites, each of which have more than 10x the bandwidth of the current Starlink system.

So I think revenue for Starlink will be at least somewhat proportionate to the total bandwidth delivered. And we will also have direct-to-sell, high-bandwidth direct-to-sell capability, and we will be building out our terrestrial network. So there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that space like Starlink are allowed to operate. So anywhere in the world that we're allowed to operate. And I think the demand for bandwidth is going to be dramatically higher than it is today. I think in three to five years, there's probably a demand for 1,000x more bandwidth than there is currently because AI or SI agents will on a per agent basis, use far more bandwidth than a person, and there will be far more agents than there are people. So this ends up requiring a several order of magnitude increase in communication bandwidth in order to satisfy that communication demand.

So talking about SpaceX Super Intelligence, SpaceX SI sexy, whatever. So as I think people are starting to realize the constraint on deployment of super intelligence is more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips. So what we've done at SpaceX is we've taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90% of all mass to orbit of earth, where China is about, I think, roughly 6% and the rest of the world combined, including the rest of the U.S. is about 4%. So a team that has been able to achieve results that are in order of magnitude greater than the rest of our -- of all competitors in space combined and applied that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute. So this is a bit like the New York Yankees playing in Little League. It's not fair. But the net result is being able to deploy power cooling infrastructure at a rate that is vastly faster than anyone else and may, at some point, be faster than everyone else combined. So I just let that sink in for a minute.

So I've been spending personally a lot of my time in Memphis, often four days a week, night and day, just getting the Memphis Supercompute cluster Colossus II online. We're tracking to be able to bring roughly 200,000 GB300s online per month for every month for the remainder of this year and continuing that pace next year. With next year being primarily Rubin, Vera Rubin compute. At this point, I would say -- I would say I'm fairly confident of being able to bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027. That would be in addition to the roughly 3 gigawatts, maybe 2.5 to 3 gigawatts that we'll have online by the end of this year. So I put it this way. I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year.

And as I mentioned earlier, we're -- power cooling, electrical equipment infrastructure is somewhat of a limiting factor. So to make sure that, that is not a constraint for our build-out, we're actually going to aim for an incremental 20 gigawatts of power cooling and infrastructure next year. So that the amount of power and cooling that we have is far in excess of what is needed for -- to turn the GPUs on. So there's a non-zero possibility. Maybe it's a small possibility at this point, but it's not zero, of having -- of SpaceX having over 20 gigawatts of Super Intelligence compute online next year. A small possibility, but it used to be zero, it's not zero anymore.

We're also planning to have the most powerful training cluster online by the end of Q2, which will be 440,000 Vera Rubin computers deployed for optimal training. This will, I think, be extremely helpful for getting Grok to be potentially the best model, but certainly to be extremely competitive. So on the Grok bot side, we're seeing the fastest growth of a product that I've ever seen in my life for Grok bot. I've never seen anything grow this fast.

We're also seeing that the usage of Grok bot grows over time per user, it does not decline. So as we make Grok bot more useful, it's actually -- we're seeing users use it more per week, not use it less. And we'll be deploying Grok Bot at scale for enterprise customers, which is a very big deal, so they can be used effectively in teams by companies as though we're a virtual human. We already are in early deployment with some trusted customers, and we expect to be in wide deployment within a few weeks for enterprise customers for Grok bot. I think Grok bot may end up being what uses most of our Super Intelligence compute.

So I mean in a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion.

Bret? Are you going next, sorry.

Sorry. I thought on that crazy note, I thought.

On that crazy note.

Yes, I don't want to give Bret a heart attack.

Thanks, Elon. So we had an exceptional execution and quarter again. And today, I'll focus both on the operational and the commercial highlights as well as talk about the priority initiatives for next quarter.

Showing a slide with the KPIs, and I'll go ahead and walk through it. Starting with our Space business. We remain the leading launch provider for the world, flying the vast majority of payload mass to orbit. During the third quarter, our 35 launches included 21 flights of Starlink on Falcon 9, 2 flights of Starship, a Falcon Heavy, which I'll talk about in a second; and 12 high-profile customer missions, including the Falcon Heavy launch, which we flew NASA's Roman Space Telescope into deep space. We also flew six national security space launch missions. We've also secured important new business, winning three additional human space flight missions on Dragon, which will take us through 2028, along with the Starlink Communications contract on NASA's Artemis III mission. In addition, we signed 18 new national.

Security space launch missions, a contract to deliver payload to the lunar surface with Starship and three new Starfall missions on Starship. We just did a Starfall mission today, by the way, on Falcon 9. Starfall is our space capsule, which provides routine access -- routine relatively low-cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes and developing better protocols for patients here on Earth.

During the final week of the quarter, we flew Starship Flight 14 to orbit, as Elon talked about, followed just after on October 1 by a triple header. We threw three Falcon missions across our three Falcon launch sites in just 13 hours. Crew-13, we brought safely to the International Space Station, a Falcon-heavy NRO mission and a rideshare mission flying 130 payloads. It's incredible display of what we can deliver in a single day across crew, commercial and national security missions.

We're also incredibly excited for what's ahead for Starship, flying the largest payloads to help build the space economy in orbit and on other planets and the moon. As Elon said, Starship's Flight 14 was a major technical milestone, and we remain on track with our goals to bring back both the first and second stages to the tower this year, refly the second stage by early next year and ramp our launch cadence as we make progress towards rapid reusability. We'll attempt an on-orbit refueling early next year, and we'll begin flying Mobile V2 and Starmind satellites in 2027.

We have had significant constructive engagement with the FAA, and we expect the license for our Flight 15 to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages. I'm also extremely excited about expanding the Starship operations to Louisiana with the second Louisiana purchase. The geography of Louisiana, the community and their work ethic is so aligned for an amazing Starship future.

Moving on to Starlink. We had another standout quarter, driven by continued growth across both our consumer, enterprise and government businesses. We ended the quarter active in 174 markets, including new market launches for Vietnam and Uganda. Looking at subscriber growth, we added 1.6 million consumers, not total users, but consumers in the quarter, reaching just under 14 million global broadband consumer subscribers. As I mentioned, this number does not include additional hundreds of thousands of enterprise subscribers and aviation customers. We remain incredibly inspired by the impact of Starlink on communities around the world, including providing service to hundreds of thousands of students and teachers in schools globally as well as for emergency response during natural disasters.

Over the third quarter, Starlink's rapid response capabilities enabled support across 25 crises, including the Venezuela earthquake, the earthquake in Western Colombia and Hurricane Lowell in Hawaii. In Venezuela alone, Starlink donated over 1,400 kits to response agencies, providing critical Starlink broadband connectivity to over 250,000 people.

As we mentioned last quarter, we continue to see significant growth opportunities on the enterprise and government side of the business with aviation a continuing major focus and fixed site gaining momentum. Starlink is now contracted for roughly 12,000 planes, almost 1/4 of the available aircraft, and we're expanding quickly with both new and existing customers. We signed agreements with three of the four major U.S. carriers, along with a growing list of leading international airlines. During the quarter, Lufthansa, Swiss, Copa Airlines, Korean Air, Austrian Airlines and Asiana Airlines all flew their first Starlink-equipped aircraft. To keep pace with this demand, we've quadrupled aviation production rate since the beginning of the year, and we expect to double before the end of the year.

Our aviation partners report that Starlink has become a key reason customers choose to fly with them, both business travelers who increasingly rely on full connectivity in the skies or even individuals who want to stay connected all the time everywhere. Our data shows Starlink and frankly, our customers tell us that Starlink equipped flights carry higher load factors on the planes and full connectivity is quickly becoming table stakes for passengers.

On the government side, Starshield continues to deliver unique mission-critical capabilities, and we see further room for growth. We remain on pace for enterprise and government revenues to exceed consumer connectivity revenues in the future, each. The successful deployment of the operational V3 broadband satellites on Starship's Flight 14 marks an important step and an inflection point for Starlink. The increased capability from these satellites, as Elon talked about, and the Starship launcher itself will provide additional capacity across markets and enable new sales in high-demand areas. We expect the market for communications to grow far beyond just human communication that we traditionally think about. Connecting cars, robots and the adoption of Super Intelligence will increase communication demands, not in percentages, but in many orders of magnitudes. In the years ahead, we expect Starlink will represent a significant -- Starlink alone to represent a significant portion of global Internet traffic.

In mobile, we continue to expand international partnerships, turning on service with new carriers across multiple countries in the third quarter, including Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kazakhstan and Costa Rica. We surpassed 22 million monthly users on Starlink Mobile as of the end of the quarter, up 37% quarter-over-quarter. Our near-term priority remains flying the mobile V2 constellation through next year and integrating our spectrum purchases to turn on service in early 2028. Just a few weeks ago, we received approval from the FCC to launch 15,000 mobile V2 sats and announced an agreement to acquire a portfolio of low-band spectrum, which will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the U.S.

Moving to Super Intelligence. The industry continues to demand ever more massive amounts of compute. We're rapidly expanding capacity to meet both our own needs as Grok and related products scale and those of our cloud service customers. Enterprise feedback on recent model releases has been positive and Grok bot, in particular, is seeing strong adoption out of the gate. Grok bot, our Agentic Assistant, launched in August, and we already had paid weekly users of 800,000 earlier this month, more than doubling over the last month. B2B is our fastest-growing category with companies increasingly using Grok bot as a force multiplier across sales, marketing, IT and engineering, treating it as an always-on teammate for complex end-to-end workflows.

We're also accelerating our Grok model release cadence with significant performance gains expected in the near term -- well, have been and more in the near term. At the same time, the integration of Cursor continues to progress well, strengthening both our product capabilities and our go-to-market reach with a scaled enterprise sales force. Early evidence of this momentum is already visible. Grok Enterprise customers with more than $1 million in run rate revenue, including Cursor, were up 50% quarter-over-quarter on a pro forma basis. Last week, we further integrated the portfolio by announcing a new scheme that brings together Grok, Grok bot, Cursor and X Premium on a single plan.

In review, our business is experiencing extremely strong momentum across all three segments, our engineering teams are scaling Starship and next-generation satellites across broadband, mobile and Starshield, while our commercial teams expand Starlink across aviation, enterprise, government and global markets. At the same time, we're scaling our Super Intelligence business in the key areas of critical compute infrastructure, leveraging our hardware expertise.

Now Bret, you get to go.

Thank you, Gwynne. We delivered another strong quarter in Q3. Revenue grew an impressive 161% year-over-year to $14.6 billion, fueled by the continued momentum in the connectivity business and our clear inflection point in the Super Intelligence or SI business. Adjusted EBITDA once again grew faster than revenue to $8.8 billion, up 306% year-over-year. The combination of our launch leadership, recurring Starlink revenue and the significant expansion of our SI infrastructure business have combined to drive meaningful operating leverage in the business. Our balance sheet remains very strong, and our focus on capital allocation continues to keep us in a position to accelerate the pace of innovation that underpins the significant revenue opportunity across all of our businesses.

I'll now walk through the financials by segment. The space revenues of $1.8 billion were up 84% sequentially and up 6% year-over-year, anchored by a favorable customer mix. We're on track to deliver strong growth for the year based on our robust customer manifest for Falcon and Dragon vehicles. As far as capital allocation, we continued to invest in our Starship program, accelerating Raptor engine and vehicle production, advancing Gigabay construction and progressing multiple launch pads at both Starbase and the Cape. And importantly, we secured the location for the next phase of United States space launch leadership in Louisiana. These investments remain essential to unlocking the step change in cost and capacity that Starship will deliver.

Connectivity, again delivered robust revenue growth and profitability with revenues of $5.2 billion, up 69% year-over-year and 22% sequentially. As Gwynne mentioned, we reached 13.6 million Starlink consumer subscribers, adding 1.6 million subscribers just in Q3 alone, driven by growth in more developed markets. During the quarter, we began ramping production of our V5 kits, which supported our progress on alleviating inventory constraints. We strategically managed our channel distribution and prioritized delivery of kits to retail channels ahead of the holiday season, which we expect will lead to increased activations in Q4.

Starlink consumer average revenue per user, or ARPU, monthly average revenue per user increased 5% sequentially to $69 per month, benefiting from a favorable customer mix dynamic in the quarter. Enterprise and government revenues grew 91% year-over-year and 18% sequentially, highlighted by growth in our Starshield program with the United States government and the continued momentum in the aviation industry. Aviation remains a major growth opportunity as we're still early in the installation phase with many of the largest carriers worldwide and have line of sight into an accelerated activation path into '27 for our key partners.

Connectivity gross profits doubled year-over-year with gross margins of 55%, including a onetime benefit of roughly 3%, primarily driven by tariff refunds in the quarter. Excluding the onetime benefits, though, adjusted EBITDA margins expanded roughly 2% year-over-year. Looking ahead, the satellite road map is a key driver of both the capacity and capability of our Connectivity segment. Through the end of the year and throughout 2027, we expect to deploy V3 broadband satellites in meaningful volume with each Starship launch ramping towards a payload that delivers over 20x the downlink capacity of the current generation of Falcon 9 launches today. In parallel, we will ramp Starlink Mobile V2 satellites on Starship starting in 2027 and leverage our newly enhanced wireless spectrum portfolio to expand our direct-to-sell service and become a major mobile carrier, as Gwynne mentioned, in the United States. Across all three of our connectivity applications, Starlink Broadband, Starlink Mobile and Starshield, the launch cadence on Starship is expected to drive a step change in total capacity coverage and service quality.

SI or Super Intelligence was again the standout growth driver for the quarter. segment revenue increased substantially to $7.6 billion, up $5 billion quarter-over-quarter and $6.7 billion year-over-year, primarily powered by the ramp of our cloud services agreements. We meaningfully improved the segment's profitability profile as we monetize newly deployed capacity and delivered powerful operating leverage for the business. We ended the third quarter with 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate compute capacity with additional data halls already online in early October.

For SI Solutions and Infrastructure, revenues were $7 billion, of which $608 million came from the Cursor acquisition closed roughly mid-quarter. And even excluding Cursor, SI Solutions and Infrastructure revenues grew 192% sequentially, driven primarily by the activation of new cloud services agreements. There are many customers asking for compute, and we're actively building the supply to meet both internal and external demand. We expect to have additional new customers in future deals and we'll continuously evaluate the highest margin usage for our compute assets across both new and existing cloud service agreements and serving inference for our own SI products.

What we're seeing in the market is extraordinary. At current pricing, new compute deployments are generating a payback of less than a year. Pricing is currently tracking slightly above the high end of the $30 to $50 per watt range we were discussing just last quarter, which further supports the attractiveness of these terrestrial SI compute investments. We'll continue to be demand-led and prudent in the pace of deployment, matching our disciplined and proactive capital planning for procurement of semiconductor supply to the near-term customer demand. Our current customer contracts for SI compute have the benefit of allowing us to flexibly manage our capacity for our own model training purposes as well as be able to monetize for our SI cloud service agreements revenue at favorable pricing as the market availability continues to tighten.

Advertising revenues grew 19% year-over-year as we build more momentum on the new advertising tech platform that we rolled out just last quarter in Q2.

SI segment adjusted EBITDA was $5 billion, up $3.8 billion quarter-over-quarter and $5.4 billion year-over-year, driven primarily by higher-margin cloud service agreements. SI segment operating income was $431 million, but excluding the $1.2 billion of stock-based compensation expense related to the Cursor acquisition, the segment delivered $1.6 billion of operating profit just in Q3. Double-clicking on the share-based compensation expenses, of the $60 billion equity value for Cursor when we purchased it, $23 billion was attributed towards retaining key employees and replacing outstanding equity awards, including revesting agreements for key executives. These equity awards will be recognized as stock-based compensation over roughly the next 3-year vesting period.

Total company capital expenditures in the third quarter were $19.6 billion, primarily in support of our SI compute build-out, starship infrastructure and satellite production.

We ended the quarter with substantial backlog totaling $63 billion as of September 30, of which $17.5 billion was recognized as deferred revenue. Approximately $42 billion of this backlog is expected to be recognized within the next year.

Looking ahead, demand remains robust across all three segments, particularly in our cloud services business. We remain on track to deliver our previously stated goal of $100 billion in ARR by the end of this year, defined as annualized revenue based on the month of December. SI infrastructure continuing to come online at Memphis and Southaven gives us visibility into an accelerated build path through the remainder of this year. As a result, we're on track to reach nearly 2.2 gigawatts of nameplate compute at the end of this month alone in October and have a clear line of sight, as Elon highlighted, to nameplate compute in the range of 2.5 to 3 gigawatts just by the end of this quarter. Because of the additional capacity coming online this quarter, we expect fourth quarter capital expenditures to now be in the range of $35 billion to $40 billion for this quarter.

We also expect total company gross margins in Q4 to be more consistent with the second quarter given some onetime benefits and customer mix that we highlighted in Q3. Given the increased visibility into our compute contract pipeline over the next 6 months, we have the opportunity to provide additional look-forward guidance on the acceleration we see in our business in Q1 2027. We now see total company revenues in the range of $33 billion to $37 billion for Q1 of 2027.

In closing, we are in a transformative phase for the company's financial profile. We're investing aggressively across SI compute, Starship development and production and next-generation Starlink broadband and mobile constellations, the three areas we believe will generate the highest long-term returns. These are demand-led investments in markets with visible, tangible returns in the near term. We're building the infrastructure of the future with discipline, focused on capital efficiency, strong returns on invested capital and maintaining a strong investment-grade balance sheet while still moving with the velocity to capture the opportunity in front of us. The combination of our diversified earnings base, focus on extreme vertical integration and the robust demand in the market for Super Intelligence gives us conviction in the path ahead.

With that, I'll turn it back to Andrea.

Thanks, Bret. We're now going to begin the Q&A section. [Operator Instructions]. We will take the first question from Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley.

First, Elon, thank you for making flying cars real.

You're welcome.

That was freaking insane. It's my first comment.

[indiscernible], and that's one of them.

It's super inspiring for people all over the world, especially young people that want to build. I got a two-part question on Terafab. You want to make chips. You want to make crazy amounts of chips onshore or in a safe and secure place. So, first, can you confirm if SpaceX has placed orders for EUV machines? If so, when do you expect delivery?

And just as a second part to the question, when you take a first principles approach to the semi fab supply chain, I know you've toured TSMC, ASML, AMD, Lam, these are very impressive companies, as I'm sure you'd agree. Where do you see the biggest areas to improve their processes and supply chain when you do it your way?

Well, I mean, we're just figuring out chip fabrication. So but I'll give it -- I'll tell you what our internal expectations are, which obviously, I put big error bars on this because we don't know if we will actually achieve this or not. But it's what we're aiming for internally is to make our first sort of test chip functional in approximately May or June of next year. That's just a kind of a SRAM chip something that basically test the line. That's at the research fab in Austin. And we're aiming to -- our aspiration is to reach volume production around Q3 of '28 at Terafab at Gibbons Creek, the main Terafab location.

Now these are very aggressive dates, and we're very appreciative of ASML and all of our other suppliers in accelerating equipment deliveries in order to achieve this outcome. Let's just say that, that outcome of achieving volume production is at least in a set of possible outcomes for Q3 or Q4 of '28. So these are obviously like insanely fast time frames for chip production.

We do have, I think, some significant potential breakthroughs in chip fabrication, but I don't think I should discuss that on an earnings call. Let's not give away the shop here. But I am optimistic that we will dramatically accelerate chip production and that Terafab will ultimately do what the name suggests, which is to make a terawatt of super intelligence chips per year.

We'll take our next question from Doug Anmuth at JPMorgan.

Great. Elon, can you talk more about just how you're working through those constraints in power cooling and infra and just what gets you comfortable with the 13 gigawatts ending '27?

And then, Bret, if you could also help us understand how you're thinking about the funding requirements just as you look out to that kind of capacity?

Yes. Well, I mean 3 gigawatts of that or very close to 3 gigawatts is what we expect to have done just in the next few months. So you can just look at the rate at which we are actually deploying and turning on compute.

What I think you hear from, I guess, other hyperscalers is you don't hear a lot of detail about how many GPUs they're actually turning on every month. And with us, you are. I'm being very as precise as possible about this. It's absolutely insane to be deploying providing the power and all the electrical equipment, the cooling, the batteries, the networking and everything else that's needed to turn on 20,000 GB300s a month but that is actually what we're doing right now. And that pace will obviously accelerate next year. We're not going to slow down.

I don't think -- again, I don't want to -- some of this -- if you say like how we're going to get all this power, let's just say like we actually -- we do have a plan that gets to 20 gigawatts of power and cooling by the end of next year. But that is not something that I should spell out. That is highly proprietary because if I tell you about it, others are going to try to do the same thing. And I'm not saying we'll have 20 gigawatts of power. I'm saying we have a plan where if everything goes right, we'll have 20 gigawatts of incremental power, I should say, next year. So 23 gigawatts roughly in total.

Now I don't expect everything to go right. That's why I said I'm confident of 10, highly confident of 10 next year. And 20 is difficult but not impossible. And I mean, some of the things we're doing, I have mentioned publicly. So we're casting the blades and vanes for the turbines. So SpaceX already has a very advanced castings capability that was developed for rocket engines. So we have, I think, actually the most advanced casting capability on earth because the demands for castings for rocket engines exceed the demands for everything and anything else you could possibly imagine.

So taking that incredible team that has, I think, objectively, the most advanced casting technology in the world and saying, hey, can you guys also make some blades and veins for terrestrial turbines is much easier than what they have done in the past. And when we talk to the turbine suppliers, they tell us that the blades and vanes are 12 to 18 months behind the rest of the turbine, meaning they can deliver everything except the blades and vanes 12 to 18 months before they can deliver the blades vein. So casting is this really difficult bottleneck. And if anything, it seems to be getting worse.

So that means that we can bring power online 12 to 18 months faster than anyone else. That's the kind of advantage that's difficult to replicate. Unless someone else is doing advanced casting -- is building an advanced casting shop, they will be unable to compete with SpaceX in this regard. And we're looking at many different sources of power, not just gas turbines. There's -- we obviously want to use solar, wind and every other source of power that we can obtain.

We think there's also a lot of opportunity for inference compute if you manufacture modular inference compute at the factory level and then such that it's -- the power and cooling are built in at the factory and then you distribute modular inference compute clusters all over the country, if not all over the world. That's about as much as I should say about scaling power and cooling. But like I said, at this point, I would say I feel highly confident of 10 gigawatts incremental next year, so 13 total. And some number over 20 is -- the probability of achieving that is rising rapidly.

Doug, the second part of your question related to funding. I think we certainly have the advantage related to others in that we are investment grade, have a very strong balance sheet. And there are a number of available pools of debt capital that we are talking to at the moment related to funding this incredible growth.

The other really important thing to emphasize is the payback period is very short. And so this capability starts to fund itself in a pretty near-term situation. And so the fact even that we're finishing this quarter with more capability starts the funding mechanism even into the first half of next year. So you have your operational cash flows, first and foremost. You have multiple pools of capital available in the debt market, especially because of our investment-grade status and strong balance sheet. And then you also have the opportunity from what we've seen to partner with, I would say, the whole value chain related to -- on the vendor and customer side.

So there's nothing easy about SpaceX for sure. And so might as well have the finance piece be part of the challenge at the same time. But we have a lot of conviction that we were going to be able to do this in a very measured fashion and continue to keep ourselves in that IG status along the way.

And certainly, if you look at our track record with respect to capital efficiency, Starship and all of our other projects, you'd be hard-pressed to find any company in the world that is as good at capital efficiency as SpaceX.

Exactly.

Next question from Edison Yu at Deutsche Bank.

I'll echo Adam's enthusiasm about the Roadster. So there's been a lot of reporting, a lot of anticipation of a merger with Tesla. I realize maybe you may be limited on what you can say. But if we take a step back, how do you think about the pros and cons of a potential combination? And as part of that framework, are there any roadblocks that you would need to address before embarking on it?

I mean this is definitely kind of a question where I feel like I'm tap dancing through a mine field. But -- so I have to be thoughtful about what I say here. I think -- so both SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss this idea at the request of shareholders. And these special committees are consist of independent directors. And because I'm a conflicted party, I can't actually be in the discussions of the special committees. So it's sort of -- it's an odd kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking, and I can't be in the conversation.

I mean I don't think we should necessarily assume that -- I think some people out there assume that a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty. And I think that would be overstating it. Do I think it would be a good idea, yes. But at the end of the day, the shareholders have to be supportive of this. And particularly on the Tesla side, we will need a 50% vote of all shares, not just those who vote, but of all shareholders. And that's quite a high hurdle to try to achieve.

So and I can just say at this point that the special committees have not reached agreement on the terms of any transaction. And obviously, there's no guarantee that they will. But I do think there's a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the super intelligence singularity. And -- and there's a lot to be gained from cooperating on developing super intelligent software, chip design, the Terafab, obviously, robotics, mass to orbit with the Starmind constellation.

Connectivity.

Connectivity. So I think it will be a good idea, but it's really up to the special committees of both companies. Like they've got to come up with something, and then that's got to be put to the shareholders as a vote.

Next question from Kutgun Maral at Evercore.

I wanted to ask about Starlink Mobile, which has come a long way in a short time, including the recent low-band deal. Even so, there's still some uncertainty about how your spectrum portfolio, even though it's much improved and possibly will continue to grow, can compete with incumbents in the U.S. And part of the unknown for us on the outside is how much coverage and capacity the satellite layer can really provide to bridge the terrestrial gap to peers. So what roles do you expect the satellite and terrestrial parts of the network will play? And how should we think about the traffic mix between them and delivering a 5G-like experience in the U.S.? And maybe more broadly, how much of the connectivity focus is on traditional retail wireless versus what could be a massive physical AI opportunity?

Yes. Let me, Elon can fill in some details, but let me point out that the vast majority of mobile connectivity is actually WiFi, right? I think it's something between 85% and 93% is done through WiFi. And keep in mind, Starlink Broadband does a lot of WiFi work as well.

As far as the mix goes, I think we expect that the S-band spectrum will provide the majority. And then obviously, you need the low-band spectrum, the 800 megahertz spectrum to basically penetrate buildings. So if you're not on WiFi, you can still receive the signal. So I think -- and by the way, I'll correct myself if I'm wrong afterwards, but I think the S-band will carry the majority and then the low-band spectrum will carry less, but provide a critical piece, by the way.

And also, we talked last quarter at the last earnings call about smaller kind of not quite tower capable, but smaller radios that we would -- we could put on already installed homes for Starlink, businesses for Starlink, towers as well. So it's not just the spectrum that we've talked about with the S-band. We will basically leverage the real estate from Starlink installs and other towers.

Yes. I think we probably should do a longer presentation on the game plan for Starlink connectivity and why we think it will ultimately be a business that generates several hundred billion dollars in revenue a year because you are missing some of the pieces that we know about internally. I can say we do see a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue. But I think we should probably describe that in more detail in a forum that's not limited to a few minutes at an earnings call.

In fact, we have three minutes left, right?

Well, we can go a little longer.

I'll take the next question from Eric Sheridan at Goldman Sachs.

Maybe if I could turn to the scaling of compute you laid out at the beginning part of the call. When you think about a framework for applying that compute to the external opportunity that presents itself from cloud services relative to the internal needs of that compute for scaling Cursor and Grok bot, how has your view evolved about striking the right balance in that mix? And how to think through the output from a monetization standpoint of what that mix might produce for the business in the next 12 to 18 months?

Well, the allocation -- the relative allocation of compute to third parties versus internal is something that's going to change from one month to the next. I guess as a rough approximation. Our goal is to kind of split it 50-50, more or less, where half of the compute is used internally and half of it is rented to others. But that number could shift 60-40 one way or the other. It could -- it's going to be dynamic. And obviously, our approach is to rent at the -- effectively the spot market rate as opposed to sign these long-term deals.

Our belief is that the value of compute per watt will increase over time, not decrease. And the reason for that, I think it should be obvious to people really is that as you improve the AI software, as the models get better and better, they're able to -- you get more useful intelligence per watt. And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt. And that's why you see things like even old computers like H100s renting for more than they rented when they were new. And I think that's likely to continue.

I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time. So I think the smart move is to do short-term contracts and to and essentially to make -- to place the bet on useful intelligence per watt increasing rapidly, which obviously has done. So that's what's happened so far.

And also, if you look at, say, how are our short-term contracts renewing? Are they renewing at higher dollars per watt or lower? And we see them renewing at higher dollars per watt, not lower dollars per watt. We are also, frankly, hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler and by dozens of smaller companies to rent more of our compute. So we could rent out our compute several times over if we said yes to everyone. That's just the situation here. That's why I posted that sort of video, video me of the Monty Python cheese shop sketch where the guy goes into a cheese shop to get some cheese and they actually have no cheese. And so he goes like, what about this kind of cheese? What about that kind of cheese? And they really just don't have any cheese.

So we've actually tried to offload some of our inference compute to other cloud providers so that we can use more compute for training. And we get the cheese shop sketch. They'll say like, well, we'll ask them about what about some GB300s, don't have any of those. What about some GB 200s, don't have any of those. What about some TPUs? Now what about some trains? No, what about some -- okay, how about some H100s. And like, well, we might have some overseas somewhere, and then they'll check and come back and say, no, we don't have that either. So it's like it's ridiculous. Yes. So I don't think we're going to have a demand issue here. And like it's not impossible. I'm not saying this will happen. It's not impossible that we will have a six-month payback period for compute next year.

We're now going to turn to some questions from individual investors that were posted directly on to our public Q&A platform. So we've talked a lot about compute deployment terrestrially, let's move to a question on V3 sats. So when will capacity gains from V3 satellites actually show up as meaningfully higher speeds and lower latency for users? How many V3 sats are needed before the network feels noticeably better in high-demand areas?

I think we'll need a few hundred V3 satellites for people to really feel the impact because right now, with very few satellites, you'll get an impact and then 10 minutes later, it won't be there. So a few hundred satellites, and I think we can achieve that by mid next year.

Take #6, which is, can you provide an update on Starbase Louisiana? What's the time line? And what's your current confidence level in achieving a first starship launch from the site as early as 2029?

Well, our internal aspiration for first launch from Louisiana is actually in two years. So '28 would be -- is our goal. But I think '29 is highly likely. I think we'll be at scale launching from Louisiana at scale in '29. Highly confident.

Thanks, everyone. This wraps up the Q3 2026 earnings report. Thank you all for tuning in, and we will see you next quarter.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.