SpaceX has reported a near-doubling of quarterly revenue in its first set of results since June’s record-breaking stock market debut, as booming demand for Starlink and its artificial intelligence services drove growth across the business.
The Elon Musk-controlled group, which now holds its rocket-launch business, the Starlink satellite network and the xAI/X artificial intelligence operations together under a single listing, posted revenue of $7.8bn for the three months to 30 June, up 92% on a year earlier.
It was a sharp increase and better than expected, but it is still some way off anything that would provide the company with a sensible valuation multiple.
“SpaceX delivered a strong quarter, but it’s so early in its life as a public company, that beating consensus carries little real weight,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown.
“Analysts are still trying to work out what the business should look like, while Elon Musk is already describing what it might become over the next decade. For now, the numbers play second fiddle to that story.”
SpaceX shares were down 7.5% in the US premarket at the time of writing.
The Connectivity area of the business is the group’s biggest revenue generator, with revenue in the division, which houses Starlink, climbing 66% to $4.3bn and operating profit rising 79% to $1.7bn, as subscriber numbers doubled year on year to 12 million.
Enterprise and government sales more than doubled, helped by new deals with American Airlines, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic and others, and by more than $6bn of multi-year US government contracts for its Starshield secure-satellite network.
The AI arm grew fastest, with revenue up 247% to $2.6bn, driven by a wave of new cloud-computing agreements worth $14.1bn in contracted sales.
The unit swung to positive adjusted EBITDA of $1.1bn, though it remained loss-making at the operating level. SpaceX is spending heavily to keep pace: AI capital expenditure hit $15.8bn in the quarter alone as it expanded compute capacity to 1.4 gigawatts and pressed on with its Colossus II build-out. During the quarter it agreed to buy the AI coding tool Cursor for $60bn, and in July it released its latest model, Grok 4.5.
The smaller Space segment lifted revenue by 29% to $962m, driven by more large customer launches, while continuing to pour money into Starship.
SpaceX ended the quarter with $100bn of cash and marketable securities and a $47.5bn backlog, bolstered by $85.7bn of net proceeds from its June listing.
“This quarter buys Musk credibility and time, but with the lock-up expiry approaching and the shares already below their IPO level, SpaceX will need to keep producing exceptional numbers to prevent its valuation from returning to Earth,” said Sam North, market analyst for etoro.