SpaceX Posts First Profit Since IPO as Q3 Revenue Jumps 161% to $14.6 Billion
SpaceX reported third-quarter revenue of $14.6 billion, up 161% from a year earlier, and net income of $4.4 billion — its first quarterly profit since going public in June. Its Super Intelligence segment, powered by AI compute deals, became the company's largest business for the first time.
SpaceX said Tuesday that its third-quarter revenue rose 161% from a year earlier to $14.6 billion, and that the company earned net income of $4.4 billion. It was the first quarterly profit for SpaceX since the company went public in June.
The results easily cleared Wall Street’s estimates. Analysts had expected earnings of 14 cents a share on about $12.9 billion in revenue, according to Investor’s Business Daily. SpaceX reported earnings of 37 cents a share, reversing a loss of 36 cents in the same quarter last year. Shares rose more than 4% late Tuesday.
Super Intelligence becomes the largest business
The growth was led by the segment SpaceX now calls Super Intelligence, which generated $7.56 billion in revenue, up nearly 830% from a year ago and larger than the launch business for the first time. FactSet analysts had expected about $6.5 billion in AI-related revenue.
“We delivered another strong quarter in Q3,” Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in the company’s release. “Revenue grew an impressive 161% year-over-year, fueled by continued momentum in Connectivity and a clear inflection in our Super Intelligence business.”
The segment is built on a string of large cloud-services deals. Johnsen said at a Goldman Sachs conference in September that the company had closed another hosting agreement worth $1.11 billion a month starting Dec. 1, and the deals reportedly include Anthropic, Google and potentially the Defense Department, according to Investor’s Business Daily. SpaceX also said in early October that it planned to raise $40 billion to buy a batch of Nvidia AI chips. Nameplate compute capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts at the end of the quarter.
“We are hounded relentlessly for our compute,” Chief Executive Elon Musk said on the earnings call, with demand coming from major hyperscalers and smaller firms. “I don’t think we’ll have a demand issue here.”
Starlink keeps growing
The Connectivity segment, home to Starlink, produced $5.25 billion in revenue, up 69% from a year earlier, topping analyst expectations of about $4.8 billion. Starlink ended the quarter with 13.6 million subscribers and about 11,100 satellites in orbit. Earlier this month the company won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to launch an additional 15,000 next-generation Starlink satellites, a market where European telecom giants are planning their own satellite service to rival it.
The traditional space segment brought in $1.77 billion, up 6% from a year ago. SpaceX flew 35 missions during the quarter, 12 for outside customers and 23 for its own programs, bringing the year’s total to 113. Capital expenditures came in at $19.6 billion for the quarter, up from $6.9 billion a year earlier, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A possible Tesla merger
On the call, Musk said SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees of independent directors to explore a potential merger, at the request of investors. “I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk said, citing his conflicts of interest, and he called a combination far from certain. Any deal would be put to a vote of both companies’ shareholders.
Musk also said the joint SpaceX-Tesla Terafab chip effort aims to produce its first research-fab chip next May or June, with production possibly ramping up in 2028. The companies, which have never made their own chips, aim to compete with products from Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung.
Reporting based on coverage by Investor’s Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal and Teslarati.
