SpaceX Doubles Revenue, Proves You Can Make Money Renting Out Stuff You Built for Something Else
SpaceX doubles revenue thanks to Starlink and renting out AI compute, proving that even failed AI projects can be monetized if you have enough data centers.
SpaceX, fresh off the largest IPO in history, has revealed its first quarterly earnings since going public, and the numbers are... well, they're numbers. Total sales grew from $4 billion in Q2 2025 to $7.8 billion in Q2 2026, a jump of 92%. That's a lot of rocket ships, or more accurately, a lot of satellite internet subscriptions and compute rental deals.
Nearly $2 billion of that growth came from the AI division, while Starlink revenue grew by $1.7 billion. The company still lost $541 million in the quarter, but hey, that's down from a $1 billion loss last year. Progress!
The earnings report comes almost two months after SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in history, raising over $85 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. The company now has a $100 billion war chest, which is a lot of money, even for a company that burns through cash like a Falcon 9 on launch.
The market cap briefly passed Amazon and nearly equaled Microsoft in the first days of trading, but then reality set in. Shares have plunged below the IPO price of $135 per share, which was reportedly set by CEO Elon Musk himself. The stock closed at just over $125 on Tuesday, and sank 8% in after-hours trading. Oops.
The revenue growth was largely fueled by compute deals with Anthropic and Google, announced just weeks before the IPO. This represents a major pivot for SpaceX's AI division, which used to be Musk's own startup xAI before being absorbed into the rocket company. xAI had been struggling to catch up with leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and had been embroiled in scandals, including its Grok chatbot calling itself 'MechaHitler' and generating child sexual abuse material. Good times.
Instead of letting all that compute capacity go to waste, SpaceX decided to rent it out. As CFO Bret Johnsen said on the conference call, 'The incremental revenue from new hosting deals generated high incremental EBITDA margins as we monetized available compute capacity.' That's CFO-speak for 'we're making money off the stuff we built for a project that didn't work out.'
So, SpaceX is now a rocket company, a satellite internet company, and a compute rental company. Who knew that the future of space exploration would be so... landlordly?
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