SpaceX Reports Q3 Revenue of $14.6 Billion, Net Income of $4.4 Billion

SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX ) reported third-quarter financial results on Tuesday. The transcript from the company's third-quarter earnings call has been provided below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

View the webcast at Summary SpaceX reported a significant financial turnaround in Q3 2026 with revenues of $14.6 billion, up 161% year-over-year, and net income of $4.4 billion, compared to a net loss of $1.1 billion the previous year. The company highlighted major strategic initiatives, including the successful Starship Flight 14 reaching orbit and plans for Flight 15 to attempt full vehicle recovery, marking a potential milestone in reusable space flight. SpaceX announced the development of a Louisiana spaceport to enhance launch capabilities, with plans for weekly Starship flights by mid-2027 and a ramp-up to twice-weekly launches by the end of 2027.

Starlink continues to expand with a significant increase in bandwidth and plans for 100,000 satellites, projecting a dramatic increase in global bandwidth demand driven by AI. SpaceX's superintelligence segment showed substantial growth, with revenues reaching $7.6 billion, driven by cloud services and the deployment of compute infrastructure. Management outlined a plan for a potential merger with Tesla, emphasizing shareholder approval and strategic synergies in superintelligence and space technologies.

The company anticipates continued robust demand across its segments, with a focus on capital efficiency and aggressive investment in Starship, Starlink, and superintelligence infrastructure. Full Transcript Andrea Williams (Head of Investor Relations) In order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness. Hello everyone. We are coming to you live from our Starlink factory and future Star Mine production site here in Bastrop, Texas.

I'm Andrea Williams, Head of Investor Relations and thank you for joining us for SpaceX's third quarter 2026 earnings presentation. Joining us are Elon, Gwen and Brett and we are live streaming on X. Our third quarter financial results were announced just after 3pm Texas time and all relevant materials have been published to our investor relations website at ir.spacex.com. For today's presentation, our prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer session.

We will take live Q and A from equity analysts and then move to questions directly from our investors that were polled on our dedicated earnings Q and A platform which the SpaceX team built with Grok. During this webcast we will discuss our business outlook and make forward looking statements. These statements are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our earnings release and the most recent filings with the SEC, including our final prospectus.

During the presentation we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. In today's earnings release and our filings with the SEC, you can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including all the reconciliations with comparable GAAP measures. For the third quarter of 2026, we announced the following financial results as compared to the prior year period: revenues of $14.6 billion, up 161% from $5.6 billion. Net income of $4.4 billion, an improvement of $5.5 billion from a net loss of $1.1 billion.

Adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 billion, up 306% from $2.2 billion. With that, I'll hand the call over to Elon. Elon Thank you. So we are in an inflection moment for SpaceX across launch, connectivity and superintelligence.

Starting with Starship, Flight 14 was a critical milestone. Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed operational Starlink V3 satellites. I think we have a recap video we're going to. All right.

For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we're going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship. This will be the… If we succeed, will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered. This is a massive technology milestone. The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle.

So this is, I think this is a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization consciousness. So let's look at what a simulation of Flight 15 would look like if we succeed. If we don't succeed in 15, we'll, we'll, we'll get there. So success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight.

And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year and then accelerating next year. So with that, the Flight 15 simulation. We've also announced the development of the Louisiana spaceport. So that's going to be an incredible asset to the country and to the world that will, I think at some point, probably have on the order of 20 or more launch towers and enable the transport of millions of tons per year to orbit and beyond.

So that's really going to be a big deal. We expect Starship to fly weekly at some point in the first half next year and then second half next year, twice weekly, or maybe even more frequently than that by the end of next year. The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve the rapid and complete reusability. So we'll have complete reusability then.

At first there will be a little bit of refurbishment that's needed between each flight and we'll iron out the need for any refurbishments so that you can immediately land the rocket and launch it again, just like an airplane. As I said, this is a profound technology milestone that most people in the world don't realize how important it is. But it will be obvious in hindsight. Starlink is also just getting started.

Flight 14 deployed 26 terabits per second of Starlink bandwidth. That's equivalent to 10 Falcon 9 launches. So a single Starlink launch, which wasn't even fully loaded — it was about maybe half loaded — did the equivalent of 10 Falcon 9 launches. So what I expect over time, not in the distant future, probably within three years, is that we will have about 100 times the bandwidth of the current Starlink constellation.

Because we will have launched satellites with an order of magnitude more bandwidth and we will place into orbit an order of magnitude more Starlink satellites — probably something on the order of 100,000 satellites, each of which have more than 10 times the bandwidth of the current Starlink system. So I think revenue for Starlink will be at least somewhat proportionate to the total bandwidth delivered. And we also have direct-to-cell, high-bandwidth direct-to-cell capability.

And we will be building out our terrestrial networks so that there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate — so anywhere in the world that we're allowed to operate. And I think the demand for bandwidth is going to be dramatically higher than it is today. I think in three to five years there's probably a demand for a thousand times more bandwidth than there is currently because AI or SI agents will, on a per-agent basis, use far more bandwidth than a person and there will be far more agents than there are people.

So this ends up requiring a several order of magnitude increase in communication bandwidth in order to satisfy that communication demand. So talking about SpaceX superintelligence — SpaceX SI, sexy, whatever. I think people are starting to realize the constraint on deployment of superintelligence is more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips. So what we've done at SpaceX is we've taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90% of all mass to orbit of Earth, where China is about, I think, roughly 6% and the rest of the world combined, including the rest of us, is about 4%.

So a team that has been able to achieve results that are an order of magnitude greater than all competitors in space combined and applied that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute. So this is a bit like the New York Yankees playing in Little League. It's not fair, but the net result is being able to deploy power, cooling, infrastructure at a rate that is vastly faster than anyone else and may at some point be faster than everyone else combined. So I just let that sink in for a minute.

I've been spending personally a lot of my time in Memphis, often four days a week, night and day, just getting the Memphis supercompute cluster classes two online. We're tracking to be able to bring roughly 200,000 GV3 hundreds online per month for every month for the remainder of this year and continuing that pace next year, with next year being primarily Vera Rubin compute. At this point I would say I'm fairly confident of being able to bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027. That would be in addition to the roughly 3 gigawatts, maybe 2 1/2, 3 gigawatts that we'll have online by the end of this year.

So I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year. And as I mentioned earlier, the power, cooling, electrical equipment infrastructure is somewhat of a limiting factor. So to make sure that that is not a constraint for our build out, we're actually going to aim for an incremental 20 gigawatts of power cooling infrastructure next year so that the amount of power cooling that we have is far in excess of what is needed to turn the GPUs on. So there's a non-zero possibility — maybe it's a small possibility at this point; it's not zero — of SpaceX having over 20 gigawatts of superintelligence compute online next year.

A small possibility, but it used to be zero; it's not zero anymore. We're also planning to have the most powerful training cluster online by the end of Q2, which will be 440,000 Vera Rubin computers deployed for optimal training. This will, I think, be extremely helpful for getting Grok to be potentially the best model, but certainly to be extremely competitive. So on the Grokbot side, we're seeing the fastest growth of a product that I've ever seen in my life.

For Grokbot, I've just never seen anything grow this fast. We're also seeing that the usage of Grokbot grows over time per user; it does not decline. So as we make Grokbot more useful, we're seeing users use it more per week, not use it less. And we'll be deploying Grokbot at scale for enterprise customers, which is a very big deal, so that it can be used effectively in teams by companies as though it were a virtual human.

We already are in early deployment with some trusted customers and we expect to be in wide deployment within a few weeks for enterprise customers. For Grokbot, I think Grokbot may end up being what uses most of our superintelligence compute. In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between 100 billion and a trillion. Brett, are you going next?

Sorry. Andrea Williams (Head of Investor Relations) It's okay, Brett, you can go instead. Brett Sorry. I thought on that crazy note, I thought on that crazy note.

Elon Yeah, I don't want to give Brett a heart attack. Gwen Thanks, Elon. So we had an exceptional execution and quarter again. And today I'll focus both on the operational and the commercial highlights as well as talk about the priority initiatives for next quarter.

Showing a slide with the KPIs and I'll go ahead and walk through it. Starting with our space business, we remain the leading launch provider for the world, flying the vast majority of payload mass to orbit. During the third quarter, our 35 launches included 21 flights of Starlink on Falcon 9, two flights of Starship, a Falcon Heavy which I'll talk about in a second, and 12 high-profile customer missions, including the Falcon Heavy launch where we flew NASA's Roman Space Telescope into deep space. We also flew six National Security Space Launch missions.

We've also secured important new business, winning three additional human spaceflight missions on Dragon which will take us through 2028, along with the Starlink communications contract on NASA's Artemis 3 mission. In addition, we signed 18 new national security space launch missions, a contract to deliver payload to the lunar surface with Starship, and three new Starfall missions on Starship. We just did a Starfall mission today, by the way, on Falcon 9.

Starfall is our space capsule which provides routine, relatively low-cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes and developing better protocols for patients here on Earth. During the final week of the quarter we flew Starship Flight 14 to orbit as Elon talked about, followed just after on October 1st by a triple-header. We flew three Falcon missions across our three Falcon launch sites in just 13 hours: Crew-13 we brought safely to the International Space Station, a Falcon Heavy NRO mission, and a rideshare mission flying 130 payloads.

It's an incredible display of what we can deliver in a single day across crew, commercial, and national security missions. We're also incredibly excited for what's ahead for Starship, flying the largest payloads to help build the space economy in orbit and on other planets and the moon. As Elon said, Starship's Flight 14 was a major technical milestone and we remain on track with our goals to bring back both the first and second stages to the tower this year, re-fly the second stage by early next year, and ramp our launch cadence as we make progress towards rapid reusability.

We'll attempt an on-orbit refueling early next year and will begin flying Mobile V2 and Starmind satellites in 2027. We have had significant constructive engagement with the FAA and we expect the license for our Flight 15 to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages. I'm also extremely excited about expanding the Starship operations to Louisiana with the second Louisiana Purchase. The geography of Louisiana, the community, and their work ethic is so aligned for an amazing Starship future.

Moving on to Starlink, we had another standout quarter driven by continued growth across both our consumer, enterprise, and government businesses. We ended the quarter active in 174 markets, including new market launches for Vietnam and Uganda. Looking at subscriber growth, we added 1.6 million consumers — not total users, but consumers — in the quarter, reaching just under 14 million global broadband consumer subscribers. As I mentioned, this number does not include additional hundreds of thousands of enterprise subscribers and aviation customers.

We remain incredibly inspired by the impact of Starlink on communities around the world, including providing service to hundreds of thousands of students and teachers in schools globally, as well as for emergency response during natural disasters. Over the third quarter, Starlink's rapid response capabilities enabled support across 25 crises, including the Venezuela earthquake, the earthquake in western Colombia, and Hurricane Lowell in Hawaii. In Venezuela alone, Starlink donated over 1,400 kits to response agencies, providing critical Starlink broadband connectivity to over 250,000 people.

As we mentioned last quarter, we continue to see significant growth opportunities on the enterprise and government side of the business, with aviation a continuing major focus and fixed site gaining momentum. Starlink is now contracted for roughly 12,000 planes, almost a quarter of the available aircraft, and we're expanding quickly with both new and existing customers. We signed agreements with three of the four major US carriers, along with a growing list of leading international airlines during the quarter. Lufthansa, Swiss, COPA Airlines, Korean Air, Austrian Airlines, and Asiana Airlines all flew their first Starlink-equipped aircraft.

To keep pace with this demand, we've quadrupled aviation production rates since the beginning of the year and we expect to double before the end of the year. Our aviation partners report that Starlink has become a key reason customers choose to fly with them, both business travelers who increasingly rely on full connectivity and even individuals who want to stay connected all the time, everywhere. Our data shows — and frankly our customers tell us — that Starlink-equipped flights carry higher load factors on the planes, and full connectivity is quite quickly becoming table stakes for passengers.

On the government side, Starshield continues to deliver unique mission-critical capabilities and we see further room for growth. We remain on pace for enterprise and government revenues to exceed consumer connectivity revenues in the future. The successful deployment of the operational V3 broadband satellites on Starship's Flight 14 marks an important step and an inflection point for Starlink. The increased capability from these satellites, as Elon talked about, and the Starship launcher itself will provide additional capacity across markets and enable new sales in high-demand areas.

We expect the market for communications to grow far beyond just human communication that we traditionally think about. Connecting cars, robots, and the adoption of superintelligence will increase communication demands not in percentages, but in many orders of magnitude. In the years ahead, we expect Starlink alone to represent a significant portion of global Internet traffic.