Elon Musk said SpaceX will hit $1trn in revenue by 2030. Its first earnings sent the stock down 11%

SpaceX has reported its first earnings as a public company, and the biggest number was not the one about rockets. The company that launches most of the world’s payloads made more money selling AI compute and satellite internet than it did from space. Revenue nearly doubled to $7.8bn. The stock still fell.

For a firm named after space travel, that is a striking reordering. SpaceX’s AI division brought in $2.6bn in the quarter, up 247% on the year. Its space business made $962m. The Verge put the shift plainly: SpaceX “made more revenue as an AI company than a space company.”

The rocket company that became a neocloud

The AI money came almost entirely from a business SpaceX barely had a year ago: renting out GPUs. It signed deals to sell compute to Anthropic in May and Google in June, and told investors those contracts drove the growth. One buyer, named in the filing only as “Customer B”, accounted for 19.5% of all SpaceX revenue, a figure that points to Anthropic.

The reframing is more than cosmetic. SpaceX said in its record June IPO documents that most of its value would come from AI, not rockets. Its accounts now read, as Engadget put it, like “the financials of an AI company in 2026”: fast growth bought with enormous spending. The AI unit still lost $1.26bn.

Starlink is still the only part that makes money

Beneath the AI story sits the business that actually pays. Starlink revenue rose 66% to $4.3bn, and its subscriber base doubled to 12 million, GeekWire reported. It was SpaceX’s only profitable segment, with $1.7bn in operating income. We have written before that Starlink is the cash machine funding everything else.

Elon Musk told analysts people were “really underestimating Starlink”, and predicted it could deliver “a majority of the world’s internet” within ten years. President Gwynne Shotwell said SpaceX would soon take on “the big three” US mobile carriers, a market she valued at $600bn. Rival satellite networks, for now, remain far behind.

Why the stock fell anyway

None of it soothed investors. Capital spending jumped more than sixfold to $18.4bn, most of it on AI, and well above what Wall Street expected. CNBC reported the figure “unnerved” the market, even as executives promised each AI investment pays for itself within a year. Shares fell as much as 11%.

The reaction fits the season. Investors have punished heavy AI spenders all quarter. SpaceX now trades below its $135 IPO price and near half its June peak, the BBC noted. A separate squeeze lands on Thursday, when a lockup expires and about $101bn of insider stock can be sold, Bloomberg reported. Roughly 35% of the tradable float is already sold short.

Musk one-upped his own executives

The call followed a familiar pattern: Musk made vast claims, and his executives walked them back. TechCrunch counted several. When the CFO carefully framed a $100bn revenue run-rate target for December, Musk cut in: it “is not a question mark. That’s what we would achieve if we basically did nothing.”

He compared SpaceX’s edge in data centres to “the New York Yankees going in and playing a Little League team”, and called building them “a trivial problem” next to reusable rockets. Then he described building factories on the Moon staffed by robots, which Fortune reported he admitted “sounds totally nuts”.

The number that matters

For all the theatre, one figure will decide whether the strategy works: the gap between revenue and spending. Musk said SpaceX’s internal target for $1trn in annual revenue had moved up a year, to 2030, with a “non-zero chance” of 2029. Reaching it means growing roughly tenfold in four years, from a company still losing money.

The next test is nearer. SpaceX aims to catch a returning Starship with its launch tower this month, a genuine engineering milestone. But the market has already priced the company as an AI-infrastructure business with a rocket company attached. Its first results did nothing to change that read. They only sharpened it, days before the lockup lifts.