Editor | Xinyuan
Musk: In 2028, $1 trillion in revenue is not impossible.
Zhidx, October 21 — Today, U.S. space and AI technology company SpaceX released its Q3 2026 earnings. Its third-quarter revenue was $14.575 billion (approximately RMB 97.358 billion), up 161% year-over-year; GAAP net profit was $4.404 billion (approximately RMB 29.418 billion), a significant improvement from a net loss of $1.054 billion in the same period last year.
In addition, SpaceX's operating profit was $2.791 billion (approximately RMB 18.643 billion), compared with an operating loss of $273 million in the same period last year; adjusted profit was $8.809 billion (approximately RMB 58.842 billion), up 306% year-over-year.
SpaceX's significant improvement in profitability this quarter was mainly driven by the explosive 830% growth of its Super Intelligence (SI) business, as well as the steady growth of its Connectivity business. The two businesses together contributed revenue of $12.808 billion (approximately RMB 85.555 billion), accounting for 87.9% of total revenue.
At yesterday's close in U.S. Eastern Time, SpaceX's market capitalization reached $1.947 trillion, just one step away from returning to the $2 trillion market cap club. Thanks to the better-than-expected earnings, SpaceX's stock surged in after-hours trading. As of 8:05 p.m. Eastern Time, its stock price had risen 8.01%, which translates to a market cap increase of more than $150 billion overnight (approximately RMB 1.00 trillion).
The earnings call became the focus of the evening. Musk turned the earnings call into a live show, and right off the bat he dropped a startling prediction: extrapolating from the current momentum, by the end of 2027, SpaceX's annual recurring revenue (ARR) would be between $500 billion and $1 trillion.
Musk's prediction posted on the X platform was even more aggressive. He believes that SpaceX reaching $1 trillion in revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible — he moved this timeline forward by two years from the previous 2030.
Musk also directly responded to questions about a potential merger with Tesla, calling it a "good idea," and revealed for the first time that both parties have, at the request of shareholders, formed special committees of independent directors to discuss the matter, but "it would be an overstatement to assume the merger is a certainty." Tesla would need 50% of all shareholders' votes in support, a very high threshold, and the special committees have not yet reached agreement on deal terms.
SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen provided several pieces of forward guidance on the call: due to the large amount of new compute coming online this quarter, Q4 capital expenditure is expected to be $35 billion–$40 billion (approximately RMB 233.8 billion–267.2 billion), and Q4 total gross margin is expected to return to a level comparable to Q2 (Q3 included one-time gains and a favorable customer mix).
At the same time, SpaceX will maintain its goal of achieving $100 billion in ARR by the end of this year (annualized based on December's single-month revenue), and its Q1 2027 revenue guidance is $33 billion to $37 billion (approximately RMB 220.4 billion–247.2 billion).
01. Super Intelligence business revenue surges 830%, Cursor consolidation and Grok ramp-up
In Q3 2026, SpaceX's total revenue was $14.575 billion, up 161% year-over-year, coming from three business segments: Space business revenue of $1.767 billion, up 6% year-over-year and 84% quarter-over-quarter, accounting for 12.1% of total revenue; Connectivity business revenue of $5.248 billion, up 69% year-over-year and 22% quarter-over-quarter, accounting for 36.0%; Super Intelligence business revenue of $7.560 billion, up 830% year-over-year and 195% quarter-over-quarter, accounting for 51.9%, surpassing the Connectivity business for the first time to become the largest revenue source.
At the operating profit level, the Space segment posted an operating loss of $7 million, a significant narrowing of losses, compared with a profit of $259 million in the same period last year; the Connectivity segment posted an operating profit of $2.367 billion, up 99% year-over-year; the Super Intelligence segment posted an operating profit of $431 million, turning from loss to profit, compared with a loss of $1.722 billion in the same period last year.
It should be noted that the Super Intelligence segment's profit this quarter included $1.217 billion in stock-based compensation expenses from the Cursor acquisition; excluding this factor, its actual profit would be even higher.
In terms of cash flow and capital expenditure, SpaceX's Q3 capital expenditure reached as high as $19.593 billion, of which the Super Intelligence segment's capital expenditure was $16.444 billion, accounting for the bulk.
As of September 30, SpaceX held $51.294 billion in cash and cash equivalents, plus $38.561 billion in marketable securities, giving it ample ammunition on its balance sheet to support its large-scale compute buildout.
The biggest highlight of the earnings report was the Super Intelligence business. The growth in Super Intelligence segment revenue in Q3 was mainly driven by the activation of new cloud service agreements, the consolidation of the Cursor acquisition, and the accelerating penetration of Grok among enterprise customers and consumers.
Among these, Super Intelligence solutions and infrastructure revenue was $7.022 billion, up $6.63 billion year-over-year; advertising revenue was $538 million, up 19% year-over-year.
In terms of compute scale, SpaceX's nominal compute reached 1.7GW as of September 30, up from 1.4GW on June 30 and 0.6GW in the same period last year.
SpaceX is continuing to advance the construction of the COLOSSUS II supercomputing cluster in Memphis. On the product side, SpaceX accelerated the release and deployment of the Grok model and launched the around-the-clock agent system Grok Bot.
This year, SpaceX completed its acquisition of AI programming tool company Cursor. According to the earnings disclosure, the transaction was completed on August 14, 2026, with an implied equity valuation of $60 billion and a GAAP purchase consideration of $42.5 billion. Of this, approximately $23 billion (nearly 40% of the equity valuation) was attributed to core talent retention and the replacement of unvested equity, which will be recognized as stock-based compensation expense over a vesting period of approximately three years.
From the closing date to September 30, Cursor contributed $608 million in consolidated revenue to SpaceX. Even excluding Cursor, Super Intelligence solutions and infrastructure revenue still grew 192% quarter-over-quarter, mainly driven by the activation of new cloud service agreements.
SpaceX stated in its earnings report that the Cursor acquisition advanced its strategy of vertically integrating compute infrastructure, super intelligence models, and applications. The integration effect has already begun to show: including Cursor, the number of Grok Enterprise customers with annual revenue run-rate exceeding $1 million grew 50% quarter-over-quarter. Last week, SpaceX also announced the integration of Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor, and X Premium into a single subscription plan.
As of September 30, SpaceX's total order backlog reached $63 billion, of which approximately $42 billion is expected to be recognized as revenue within the next year.
On the funding side, Johnsen emphasized that SpaceX has an investment-grade rating and a strong balance sheet, and that in addition to operating cash flow, it has multiple debt capital market channels available, and that the compute business "can almost self-fund once it gets started."
02. Starship's first orbital-class flight succeeds and generates revenue for the first time, Starlink subscribers nearly double in a year
On the space business side, the biggest milestone this quarter was Starship Flight 14 — SpaceX completed its first orbital-class Starship flight and used it to carry out its first revenue-generating Starship mission, delivering 26 Starlink V3 satellites to the broadband constellation. The downlink capacity brought by a single Starlink mission is about 10 times that of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch.
During the quarter, SpaceX completed a total of 35 launches with 476 tons of mass to orbit, including using a Falcon Heavy rocket to send NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into deep space. On the order side, SpaceX signed three new NASA Crew Dragon missions, 18 National Security Space Launch missions, and a contract to use Starship to deliver payloads to the lunar surface, and announced the construction of the Louisiana Starbase spaceport, targeting a first launch in 2029.
SpaceX's Connectivity business is represented by Starlink. On user data, as of September 30, 2026, Starlink consumer subscribers reached 13.6 million, nearly double the 7.2 million in the same period last year, with an average monthly ARPU of $69. In terms of revenue structure, consumer revenue was $3.121 billion, up 57% year-over-year; enterprise and government revenue was $2.127 billion, up 91% year-over-year, making it the fastest-growing sub-business, with approximately 12,000 aircraft signed in the aviation segment, close to a quarter of the global available fleet. On the mobile side, Starlink Mobile monthly active users surpassed 22 million, up 37% quarter-over-quarter. On October 8, SpaceX announced the acquisition of a nationwide 800MHz low-band spectrum license portfolio to advance its Starlink Mobile strategy, with the transaction expected to close in the first half of 2027.
03. AI chips planned to tape out new deployment by mid-next year, compute payback period under one year
On SpaceX's earnings call, compute expansion became the main thread. Musk said that the bottleneck in Super Intelligence deployment is shifting from chips to power, cooling, and infrastructure, and that SpaceX has pulled in a team that accounts for nearly 90% of the world's mass to orbit to build ground-based compute, with a deployment speed that "may exceed the combined total of all other players."
SpaceX's specific goals include: building approximately 2.5–3GW of nominal compute by the end of this year, and adding 10GW of compute in 2027. Musk is "quite confident" about this. SpaceX is advancing at a pace of bringing online about 200,000 GB300 GPUs per month, for the rest of this year and unchanged next year, except that the mainstay will switch from GB300 to Vera Rubin GPUs.
The company is also planning 20GW of power and cooling infrastructure in parallel. Musk said that compute exceeding 20GW in 2027 "is unlikely, but no longer zero." By the end of October this year, nominal compute will reach about 2.2GW. Before the end of June next year, SpaceX also plans to bring online the world's strongest training cluster, deploying 440,000 Vera Rubin GPUs.
On self-developed AI chips, Musk revealed that SpaceX has set an aggressive goal: the R&D production line in Austin plans to tape out the first batch of test chips in May–June 2027, and the main Terafab production line at Gibbons Creek aims to achieve mass production in Q3 2028.
Musk emphasized that "this is an extremely aggressive timeline," and said that SpaceX holds "potentially breakthrough technology" in chip manufacturing processes. Terafab's ultimate goal is to produce 1 terawatt of compute chips per year.
Grok product data was equally impressive. Grok Bot launched in August this year, and by the beginning of this month its paid weekly active users had reached 800,000, doubling within a month. Musk called it "the fastest-growing product I have ever seen in my life," and said that user engagement time does not decline but rises over time.
The enterprise version of Grok Bot has already been deployed early among some customers and will be rolled out at scale within weeks. Musk expects that Grok Bot may eventually consume most of SpaceX's Super Intelligence compute.
On compute leasing strategy, SpaceX tends to sign short-term contracts at prices close to the spot market, with internal use and external leasing roughly dynamically allocated at 50:50. Musk judges that the effective intelligence produced per watt of compute will continue to rise, and that compute unit prices will rise over the long term. SpaceX's short-term contract renewal prices for compute are rising, and "if we agreed to all leasing requests, we could lease out the compute several times over."
SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen added that the payback period for newly deployed compute is currently less than one year, and it is not ruled out that it could shorten to six months next year, with compute pricing already slightly above the upper end of the $30–50 per watt range given last quarter.
Regarding Starlink Mobile, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said that the S-band will carry the main traffic, while the 800MHz low band will be used for building penetration. Musk judged that SpaceX could achieve hundreds of billions of dollars in annual connectivity revenue in the future.
Regarding Starlink V3 satellites, Shotwell said that hundreds of satellites are needed before users can clearly perceive the improvement, a goal that could be achieved by mid-next year.
Speaking about the Louisiana Starbase under construction, Musk revealed that the internal target is actually a first launch in 2028, and "2029 is highly certain to achieve scaled launches."
04. Conclusion: SpaceX's transformation has substantively taken shape, whether it can sustain profitability deserves attention
Judging from the earnings data, SpaceX has clearly crossed the profitability inflection point. On one hand, Starship achieved its first orbital flight and began commercial monetization, and Starlink's user base nearly doubled in a year, with the core business still expanding.
On the other hand, the Super Intelligence business's single-quarter revenue of $7.56 billion and Adjusted EBITDA of $4.95 billion prove that SpaceX's second growth curve has substantively taken shape. SpaceX is transforming from a rocket launch company into an infrastructure company spanning three major fields: space, connectivity, and super intelligence.
Of course, concerns also exist: of the nearly $20 billion in capital expenditure in a single quarter, more than 80% went into Super Intelligence compute buildout. Whether this level of investment intensity can continue to generate returns will be the focus of market attention in the coming quarters.
Join the official Coincamps community:
X: https://x.com/coincamps
Telegram: https://t.me/coin_camps