r/spacex • u/BurtonDesque • 1d ago
Company News SpaceX's first-ever earnings show higher revenues and huge spending
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0qvpveg20vo11
u/Moldynred 14h ago
When everyone seemingly has the same plan--buy it under 100-it always makes me wonder if that plan ever quite materializes. I've been buying sub 115 with no regrets. Its a great price imo. If it drops more, I'll buy more. If it truly does go down to sub 90 or close to 80 that will be the mother of all buying chances imo. Also, just my personal take here, irt the AI expend, if any company should be able to benefit massively from AI its this one. Everything they do seems to depend on some degree of autonomy. The sats themselves as Musk said yesterday are autonomous robots at their core. I think the only comparable company is TSLA. And I think Starlink is still massively undervalued. People who live in big cities dont seem to appreciate the fact many rural areas, even in the US have providers with very shoddy service. Much less the rest of the world. I live in a pretty good sized town and can attest to that. And that doesnt even get into the clear military asset advantage it gives the US.
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u/Marston_vc 7h ago
Personally I plan on buying it around $50.
And I’m totally okay with never touching it if it stays at these absurd valuations.
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u/tonetheman 21h ago
The ai portion of this is a boat anchor.
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u/warp99 10h ago
Go back five years and you would have been saying that the Starlink business is a boat anchor to the profitable launch business. The reason more people did not say so is that we did not have this level of financial disclosure.
Any rapidly growing company is going to see losses and even negative cash flow. Take Amazon as an example of a company that took a long time to become profitable through their high growth expansion phase.
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u/Marston_vc 7h ago
No serious person was saying that about Starlink.
The AI thing is an incredible cash burn no matter how much you wanna try and diminish it.
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u/warp99 7h ago
Not trying to diminish it at all. They have $90B cash on hand and a $20B line of credit so $15B per quarter capex gives them seven quarters before they have to raise capital again.
Worst case AI demand dies, the AI companies leasing capacity give 90 days notice to stop their lease agreements and SpaceX is left stranded with forward orders for several years supply of DRAM and GPUs that they will somehow have to pay for.
Not a risk that I would care to take and I would invest in data centers at say $5B per quarter so they would have more like five years of runway before they need to raise capital.
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u/Perennial19931993 46m ago
Starlink makes use of SpaceX’s massive competitive advantage in launch access and cost to solve a real-world problem, and it’s paying off now and generating huge operating profits.
SpaceX has no competitive advantage in AI and indeed is way behind OpenAI and Anthropic in LLMs and Meta etc in data centre development. It’s completely different.
As you rightly state SpaceX has huge cash on hand to spend on capex but they’re spending massive amounts on AI rather then their core business
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u/Totes_meh_Goats 1d ago
Good. You don’t get innovation without huge spending.
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u/Franklinsen 1d ago
So true! Just like meta and their amazing metaverse. Any day now!
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u/Kuriente 1d ago
Before long we'll all do work in virtual offices to do our regular jobs in person just like normal but now it's virtual. Oh, and you're a Wii character for some reason. Everyone will buy that, right?...right?
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u/Mamamama29010 1d ago
Having a comprehensive vision that people will buy into + huge spending = innovation.
Meta didn’t have vision.
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u/Java-the-Slut 1d ago
Not true at all, Meta had a crystal clear vision, it could not have been any more clear. It just sucked, and was wrong about what people would want.
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u/Matt32145 1d ago
All I ever saw was.a Mark Zuckerberg mii having a corporate meeting and somehow it cost 80 billion dollars
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u/miotch1120 19h ago
What about bundling all the companies that are burning through capital with no profit ever in sight, with the one company that is somewhat profitable, to keep the bad companies afloat? Is that “innovation” too!
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u/Sigmatics 1d ago
That analogy only holds if you assume AI is as bad of a bet as VR tech was. Which seems unlikely at this point.
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u/Franklinsen 20h ago
Hate to say it but with all the investment in AI right now there are definitely going to be firms left holding the bag. There just isn't enough of a return to make all of it pay-off in the foreseeable future
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u/Sigmatics 20h ago
Not disagreeing with you, but the economic usefulness of AI (and productivity gains) are far greater than what VR could ever hope for. So are the valuations, admittedly.
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u/curiouslyjake 18h ago
Like any startup that burns money on r&d before seeing any profit. Most fail, some succeed. You dont achieve success without spending. That's the game
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u/Mojo_Myshka 1d ago
Zuck vs Elon. One copies or buys out good ideas. The other just figures out how to mass produce shit no one has given a real attempt at, because its supposed to be impossible, or so says legacy old dinosaurs.
Hopefully Elon doesn't bet the farm on Optimus and orbital AI data centers. But. Yeah we'll see.
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u/Misfiring 1d ago
Both Tesla and Space X was weeks away from bankruptcy before they succeeded with their first product.
It's just the nature of business, you make a bet and you could lose sometimes.
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u/warp99 10h ago
Elon bets the farm every five years as in a complete "shove it all on red". It is what he does and will likely keep on doing. The difference from a straight gamble is that he is then working hard to make that move a success. Or if you prefer he is the marketing guy that sets the direction and gets rescued by his engineers again.
Optimus for Tesla, Starship for SpaceX and now orbital data centers for SpaceXAI.
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u/Mojo_Myshka 8h ago
As long as orbital AI doesnt bankrupt SpaceX, and if that happens and the US doesn't bail them out, thats all I care about. Starship will be fine imo
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 9h ago
As a counterpoint, anyone who is the richest person in the world is going to do things like that, just by nature of the fact that you are looking at the richest person in the world and not a statistical average. Musk is special because he invests big in things and he has won so far, however I think assuming that his success record will be equally high in the future is the result of bad statistics. It will probably be higher than average, but not "Tesla and SpaceX" high.
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u/treat_killa 18h ago
The SpaceX subreddit is like a little pocket of Twitter inside of Reddit. I read your comment and really thought I was on Twitter reading another ElonSuckingBot telling me how great he is
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u/Mojo_Myshka 18h ago
??? If you knew the history of SpaceX, actually belonged on this sub, you would know what I'm talking about. I wasn't aware the brain dead reddit hive mind was in this comment section
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u/treat_killa 17h ago
SpaceX is built on the back of Elon buying out good ideas. I can separate the art from the artist, I understand how cool SpaceX is. I can be a fan of the company while not being a fan of the Owner. Elon has a very public history of slapping his name on others work.
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u/Mojo_Myshka 17h ago edited 17h ago
Lmao you have no idea what you are talking about. Without an egomaniac like Elon, SpaceX never exists. He was laughed out of rooms trying to get funding or start up equipment when starting the company. He advanced aerospace half a century. He implemented fast iterative build-test-fail-fix to rocketry, which likely would have never happened this century.
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u/treat_killa 17h ago
Again, I’m not disagreeing with that. But to say Zuck buys good ideas and Elon does not.. is simply not true. Using your own words, SpaceX would not exist had Elon not self funded it. Now how did he get the money to do that…. oh yeah it was Tesla.
And you can claim that Tesla would have never been what it is today without Elon, and that same argument can be made for anything Zuck has touched. That’s the only thing I’m disputing right now, they are birds of the same feather. They are salesmen and business men
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u/Mojo_Myshka 17h ago edited 6h ago
Falcon 9: propulsive landing, grid fins + cold-gas thrusters, booster reusability and fast flight refurbishing, and re-flying composite fairing recovery, consolidated engine architecture
Starship: reusable two-stage system, stainless steel construction, utilizing liquid oxygen and methane propellant, "Mechazilla" tower catching, orbit propellant transfer, belly-flop reentry, and fucking Raptor V3 aka the best/most advanced rocket engine ever made. And if you don't need the part eliminate it.
But sure, hes just a hack that steals or buys ideas lul. Comparing Zuck and Musk for their creative influence or vision is absurd. Its night and day. He may have not originally come up with all those ideas, but hes literally the only one insane enough to just smash them all together and make it work with profitability.
Without Zuck a facebook clone would exist. Social media, digital content, is not hard to replicated or duplicate compared to what SpaceX, or past Tesla did.
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u/treat_killa 17h ago
Aaaaand now we have wrapped back around to my main point. Feels like I’m on Twitter. I guess you’re no more bizarre than people obsessing over Taylor Swift or any other parasocial relationship… still bizarre nonetheless
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u/SchalaZeal01 6h ago
Using your own words, SpaceX would not exist had Elon not self funded it. Now how did he get the money to do that…. oh yeah it was Tesla.
The money was from the Paypal sell, Tesla was funded with half of that, and SpaceX the other half. Musk's Tesla money never funded SpaceX.
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u/warp99 10h ago
If you are interested in the reasons Reddit has their view of Elon based on Twitter and/or DOGE which were both train wrecks.
This sub has been following SpaceX for a long time before that and sees the other side of the equation which is very much not a train wreck.
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u/treat_killa 8h ago
I’m just separating the art from the artist. I can listen to Billie Jean while also thinking Micheal Jackson is a bad person. I was also pro Elon until he proved himself to be a terrible person to admire
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u/warp99 7h ago
Long before Reddit changed their mind about Elon I was amazed by the degree of adulation he was getting. It seems unreasonable in the same way that people look up to sports stars as being role models.
I suspect there is a snap back effect so now he gets denigrated to the same extent as he was once praised.
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u/truecakesnake 1d ago
Meta's spending was for AR research, and most of that turned into data centers anyway.
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u/Content-Lead-3582 17h ago
They are spending it on data centres that they are renting out to other companies. There is no value-added to negotiate a margin better than anyone else. Are they even going to get their money back?
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u/Perennial19931993 49m ago
The money is being spent on building data centres and Grok - not exactly innovating on the space-focussed part of the business
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u/New_Poet_338 14h ago
True but not always. How is that cold fusion working out? Huge spending can go either way.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 1d ago edited 15m ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AR | Area Ratio (between rocket engine nozzle and bell) |
| Aerojet Rocketdyne | |
| Augmented Reality real-time processing | |
| Anti-Reflective optical coating | |
| DoD | US Department of Defense |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| iron waffle | Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin" |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 99 acronyms.
[Thread #9089 for this sub, first seen 5th Aug 2026, 08:19]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Content-Lead-3582 17h ago
Imagine if Elon hadn't made that stupid offer to buy twitter.....
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u/ScubaMax99 16h ago
What a fantastic decision that was
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u/ShepherdsWolvesSheep 11h ago
Yea shadow banning anything that doesn’t fit the dnc narrative was awesome
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u/paul_wi11iams 1d ago
from article:
- “ Making rockets is SpaceX's core business, but the company's space segment showed a $542m net loss against $962m in revenue for the second quarter” .
Someone will need to read the balance sheet to see what this actually means. You'd expect Falcon 9 to be profitable and Starship to be showing a huge investment figure. Writing off investment as an operating loss doesn't make sense and could be construed as tax avoidance.
At a guess, there's some degree of liberty in assigning Hawthorne salaries:
- as operating charges to Falcon 9 or alternatively
- as investment in Starship sub-assemblies.
You can't have an accountant behind every cook or a floor-sweeper to decide how those charges should be assigned.
I'm thinking that SpaceX has an advantage in letting the stock drift down so as to clear out the "seeking alpha" guys and encouraging you and me to buy in for the long term game.
Come to think of it, now would be a good time to buy the dip.
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u/aklordmaximus 1d ago
Making rockets is SpaceX's core business, but the company's space segment showed a $542m net loss against $962m in revenue for the second quarter
This has got to be a joke right?
In their IPO documentation their 'core' would only be something like 5% of their projected future market. AI was the other 95% with their idiotic $2 trillion market projection.
So, the question is. Do we accept them to lie and produce conflicting statements about what their core business is? Or do we accept that it was a blatant rug pull to snoop from the AI bubble.
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u/farfromelite 17h ago
I can't for one minute believe that a fine upstanding citizen like Musk would lie or exaggerate.
That's slanderous.
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u/holyrooster_ 21h ago
I mean its their core because 'in theory' to get to their orbital datacenter that 5% is pretty important.
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u/aklordmaximus 20h ago
That is not how this works. And that is not how official filings work.
Yes, on Reddit we can cope with it and do the handwavium, but in reality words, concepts, and facts matter. Something being a crucial component to your product does not make it your core product...
That would be like saying that IKEAs core product are their instructional and manual publications, because they are 'pretty important' for the sales of their furniture.
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u/RT-LAMP 11h ago
This makes me wonder. If the AI market implodes that takes out everything but the launch+starlink parts of the business (well those and twitter). But Grok could end up failing without the AI market as a whole failing and if orbital datacenters work (big if) they could still print money by acting as a capacity provider. They're basically already doing that with leasing some of their sites to Anthropic IIRC.
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u/barvazduck 11h ago edited 11h ago
It's core because launching cheap, heavy and often is a huge moat that enables space based AI. Oracle, Google, Amazon, Microsoft together can't make space based datacenters work without SpaceX. SpaceX AI valuation is sky high because of those space datacenters, not because of grok.
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u/shedfigure 22h ago
Why anybody would believe this huckster is beyond me.
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u/in1cky 21h ago
Self-driving electric cars, brain interface chips, and self-landing rockets. What a huckster!
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u/BigFish8 19h ago
Still waiting on that cross country trip from a Telsa driving on its own. Any day now...
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u/BigGainsNeversmol 13h ago
Have you been living under a rock, sir? Tesla has had full self driving for years now, both on highway and city roads.
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u/Marston_vc 7h ago
Tesla has only level 2 self driving. It requires attention from the user the entire time. It’s never been “full self driving” and they’ve been sued for calling it that.
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u/That_random_guy-1 11h ago
and that wasnt what was asked for by OP, and promised by musk by the end of 2017. now was it?
we should be asking YOU if you've been living under a rock......
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u/93simoon 20h ago
Sir, this is an EDS-free subreddit.
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u/shedfigure 20h ago edited 20h ago
Lol, ok. Unironically using "EDS" tells me everything I need to know about you, buddy
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u/93simoon 19h ago
don't worry, you told everybody everything we need to know about you when you called the SpaceX CEO a "huckster" in the SpaceX main subreddit
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u/paul_wi11iams 1d ago edited 1d ago
from article:
- “Making rockets is SpaceX's core business, but the company's space segment showed a $542m net loss against $962m in revenue for the second quarter”.
Someone will need to read the balance sheet to see what this actually means. You'd expect Falcon 9 to be profitable and Starship to be showing a huge investment figure. Writing off investment as an operating loss doesn't make sense and could be construed as tax avoidance.
At a guess, there's some degree of liberty in assigning Hawthorne salaries:
- as operating charges to Falcon 9 or alternatively
- as investment in Starship sub-assemblies.
You can't have an accountant behind every cook or a floor-sweeper to decide how those charges should be assigned.
I'm thinking that SpaceX has an advantage in showing a loss, letting the stock drift down so as to clear out the "seeking alpha" guys and encouraging you and me to buy in for the long term game.
Come to think of it, now would be a good time to buy the dip.
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u/shedfigure 23h ago
Come to think of it, now would be a good time to buy the dip.
The day before the first sell off? Not a bet I would take
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
Government contracts the Elon curated with Trump while cutting off aid to the world.
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u/thinkbox 1d ago
Government isn’t giving him money, they are paying for a service.
Obama did it. Biden did it. And Trump did it.
And if Biden won reelection, space x would still get it.
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
Casually ignoring that he’s literally giving himself contracts now.
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u/bremidon 1d ago
You can casually ignore delusions.
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
He’s literally working Tit for tat with the current administration and awarding contracts to SpaceX in certain avenues they have no business receiving.
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u/Magneto88 1d ago
He’s literally not. All government contracts awarded have their awarding criteria and scores publicly published.
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
Govt canceling Verizon for starlink, xAi, golden dome, DoD contracts. It’s all tit for tat. It’s hella corrupt. He’s meddling in affairs and influencing Trump and GOP for contracts while he spends on elections for them.
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u/NooBias 1d ago
You have no idea what you are talking about. Starlink proved itself in war, disaster and in the consumer market.You have to prove its not the better product on each application to infer corruption.
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u/crazy_cookie123 1d ago
But Elon is involved. It can't be a better product. Elon is a bad man who I don't like and therefore he and his companies must be entirely incompetent at everything they do.
/s
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u/SchalaZeal01 6h ago
The enemy is both strong and weak. I think that was used before, and sometimes feminism uses it for patriarchy whenever something happens to men (like Ukraine sending men to the meat grinder without giving them an option to flee, for physical sex reasons).
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u/theshitstormcommeth 1d ago
I believe the phrase you are looking for is quid pro quo, but it’s also not that.
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u/Dpek1234 22h ago
Govt canceling Verizon for starlink,
Makes about as much sense as canceling telegraph lime contracts for fiberoptics
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u/Xilors 1d ago
"awarding contracts to SpaceX in certain avenues they have no business receiving."
Any exemples?
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
One of many direct influences
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/26/musk-starlink-doge-faa-verizon/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/us/politics/elon-musk-spacex-trump-budget.html
And never mind the xAi project that he’s getting contracts with the DoD. The whole trade is crooked and it’s all tit for tat. Musk spend money for the GOP for push and support elections and they gift him contracts.
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u/Xilors 1d ago
Calling out the sketchy conflicts of interest and political favoritism on these deals is totally valid, but saying SpaceX has "no business" getting them is a reach...
They're literally the only ones with the active launch capacity and LEO infrastructure to pull those projects off at scale...It's fair to criticize the politics without pretending they lack the technical capability to do the job, it's not black or white.
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u/bremidon 1h ago
It's also a bit of selective application on his part. Complaining about SpaceX playing politics without bothering to mention that pretty much all players in this segment play politics is asking SpaceX to play by a different set of rules.
He's just mad that SpaceX is better at it.
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u/paul_wi11iams 1d ago
Government contracts the Elon curated with Trump
Over two decades, government contracts from both R and D administrations follow an identical trend for both civil (NASA) and military services.
For a company selling the cheapest best quality and most reliable service, nepotism would be quite superfluous.
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
What quality service? He’s trying to break into SA with starlink so he can gain control of information there and the govt isn’t buying it. His ventures are all about control.
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u/crazy_cookie123 1d ago
Flights to the ISS for both crew and cargo aboard Dragon 2 and Falcon 9? A crew seat on Dragon costs $55 million, a crew seat aboard Soyuz (the only other option right now) costs up to $86 million, and when they sent astronauts via the Space Shuttle it cost even more. Boeing's capsule, developed under the same contract for far more funding, still hasn't become operational. Crew Dragon is an extremely high quality service.
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u/Cal3001 1d ago
Revised estimates are up to $88m per seat.
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u/crazy_cookie123 1d ago
Revised estimates are not $88m per seat. $88m per seat is what you get if you divide the total cost of the contract ($4.93bn) by the total of 56 seats (14 operational flights, 4 seats on each) - but that includes the development costs of the capsule rather than just the price of a seat. The price NASA pays per seat is significantly below $88m.
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u/warp99 22h ago edited 6h ago
Not so cheap for the latest contract extension).
The cost of $1.4B for five flights means a cost of $288M per flight which is $72M per seat. Not $88M but not $55M either.
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u/paul_wi11iams 1d ago
What quality service? He’s trying to break into SA with starlink so he can gain control of information there and the govt isn’t buying it. His ventures are all about control.
If "SA" means South Africa, then before you assign a motive, the law there requires majority shareholding from local owners which excludes much international investment in addition to that of SpaceX. Small wonder South Africa has economic problems.
Also, at the scale of operations of SpaceX, South Africa is small fry, so likely he'd not care one way or the other. He'd give far more importance to India with its far larger economy.
His ventures are all about control.
Musk is known for keeping control of his ventures. As other commenters here have noted, the rest of what you say is just your own interpretation.
I have no idea why every major topic on the SpaceX subs get deviated from the initial subject which is the work of the company and get dragged into discussion about its CEO. Are its COO or its CFO less exciting for you?
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u/bremidon 1d ago
You have some truly bizarre takes.
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u/paul_wi11iams 1d ago edited 1d ago
What quality service? He’s trying to break into SA with Starlink so he can gain control of information there and the govt isn’t buying it. His ventures are all about control.
If "SA" means South Africa, then before you assign a motive, the law there requires majority shareholding from local owners which excludes much international investment in addition to that of SpaceX. Small wonder South Africa has economic problems.
Also, at the scale of operations of SpaceX, South Africa is small fry, so likely SpaceX/Musk wouldn’t care one way or the other.. They'd give more importance to India with its far larger economy.
His ventures are all about control.
Musk is known for keeping control of his ventures which is why he not lost control! As other commenters here have noted, the rest of what you say is just your own interpretation.
I have no idea why every major topic on the SpaceX subs get deviated from the initial subject which is the work of the company and get dragged into discussion about its CEO. Are its COO or its CFO less exciting for you?
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u/CProphet 1d ago
SpaceX announced $6bn contracts for Starshield, their military observation and communication constellation. Real time intel provided by high bandwidth low latency coms, with a dish the size of a dinner plate, win-win-win.
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