Elon Musk’s SpaceX posts first operating profit as AI revenue nearly triples
SpaceX just posted a quarterly net income of $4.4 billion.
The short version
- Total revenue jumped 161 percent to $14.6 billion in the third quarter.
- The new Super Intelligence AI segment brought in $7.56 billion alone.
- Starlink added 1.6 million new consumer subscribers during the quarter.
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, just delivered a massive quarter for his rocket company. SpaceX reported its first operating profit as a public company with third-quarter revenue rising 161 percent to $14.6 billion year over year, cruising past the $12.86 billion analysts expected, according to Fortune.
The company reported net income of $4.4 billion, a sharp rebound from a net loss of $541 million in the second quarter and $5.5 billion a year ago. Operating income hit $2.79 billion, well above expectations. SpaceX’s AI segment, renamed Super Intelligence, clocked in with revenue of $7.56 billion.
That unit includes computing capacity leased to Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google; Google, the search engine giant; Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot; and X, the social media platform. Connectivity revenue, mostly from Starlink, rose 69 percent to $5.25 billion, while Starlink added 1.6 million new consumer subscribers.
Capital spending came in at $19.6 billion in the quarter. Meanwhile, SpaceX recently agreed to buy investment firm Grain Management’s 800-megahertz-band licenses to boost its Starlink Mobile phone service indoors, in a deal subject to Federal Communications Commission approval that was reported at $8 billion.
The blowout numbers arrived just a day after Musk posted on X that he planned to offer a share of SpaceX stock to every child in America next year. When a company triples its AI revenue in a single quarter, the scale of the rocket business starts to look less like space exploration and more like a tech monopoly.
