SpaceXs first-ever earnings show higher revenues and huge spending

SpaceX has delivered its first-ever quarterly business report, which showed revenue nearly doubled but its spending skyrocketed.

The company, run by Elon Musk, builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites and owns the social media platform X. It began trading on the US stock market in June.

SpaceX said its revenue had grown 92% to $7.8bn (£5.8bn) compared with a year ago, but its spending was up more than 550% to $18.3bn, on top of a net loss of $2bn during the first six months of the year.

Its stock fell nearly 9% in after-hours trading. Musk said during a call with financial analysts and investors afterwards that people seemed to be “underestimating” SpaceX.

He cites Starlink, the one part of the company that is currently making a profit, bringing in $1.6bn in the second quarter. Musk said he expects that business to grow exponentially in the coming years.

“It’s not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will operate most of the world’s internet,” Musk said.

He also spoke of an expected and rapid growth of SpaceX’s emerging line of business selling compute power needed for artificial intelligence (AI) projects to other companies, which currently include Google and Anthropic.

Although SpaceX currently has 1.4 gigawatts of such compute power ready to use, Musk said that sometime next year that capacity should hit at least 10 gigawatts through its ongoing development of data centres.

Musk said during the call: “Data centres are a trivial problem compared to making reusable rockets.”

Making rockets is SpaceX’s core business, but the company’s space segment showed a $542m net loss against $962m in revenue for the second quarter.

SpaceX’s AI business also lost $1.2bn during the quarter, on revenue of $2.5bn.

Bret Johnson, head of finance for SpaceX, said during the call that the company’s capital spending would continue at a “very similar” level for the rest of the year.

Nevertheless, Musk said that SpaceX would likely hit $1tn in revenue by 2030, a year earlier than he thought just six weeks ago.

Despite this optimism, shares of SpaceX remained down in after hours trading on Tuesday, effectively wiping out gains during the day.

Since making history with its largest-ever public listing, and then briefly eclipsing much larger and more established companies like Microsoft and Amazon in total market valuation, SpaceX has struggled to hold on to investor enthusiasm.

Its stock has steadily drifted down in price since reaching an on-the-day high of $176 in June.

It has been trading lower than its original $135 per share debut price for the last several weeks.