SpaceX published its first results as a listed company on 4 August 2026. Second-quarter revenue rose 92% to $7.81 billion, ahead of analyst forecasts, and the net loss narrowed to $541 million. Starlink produced $1.66 billion of operating income and paid for almost everything else. The surprise was capital expenditure of $18.4 billion in a single quarter, $15.8 billion of it for AI computing. The launch business, the part of SpaceX most people picture, brought in $962 million and lost $542 million at the operating level.
The first SpaceX earnings report landed on Tuesday 4 August 2026, seven weeks after the company listed on Nasdaq. For the first time, outsiders could read segment numbers for a group that had spent two decades as a private company: how much Starlink earns, what rockets cost, and how heavily the AI division draws on the balance sheet. This analysis walks through the figures, what management said on the call and what the results imply for competitors, suppliers and customers. It is part of the Kurums Space Economy hub, and it sits alongside our background profile of the Starlink business.
What did SpaceX report?
Revenue of $7.81 billion for the second quarter of 2026, up 92% year on year, with a net loss of $541 million and adjusted EBITDA of $3.54 billion.
Where does the money come from?
The Connectivity segment, which is Starlink, delivered $4.29 billion of revenue and $1.66 billion of operating income. The Space and AI segments both lost money at the operating level.
What worried investors?
Capital expenditure of $18.4 billion in one quarter, well above the roughly $13 billion analysts expected. Shares fell about 7% in after-hours trading.
What did the first SpaceX earnings report show?
SpaceX reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $7.814 billion, up 92% from $4.07 billion a year earlier. The net loss was $541 million, about half the loss of roughly $1 billion in the same quarter of 2025, and adjusted EBITDA reached $3.538 billion.
The company reports three segments. Connectivity, which is Starlink, generated $4.291 billion. AI, built around the former xAI business, generated $2.561 billion. Space, which covers launch and spacecraft, generated $962 million. The consolidated operating result was a loss of $143 million, compared with an operating loss of about $970 million a year earlier according to Regolithβs summary of the release. For the first six months of 2026, revenue was $12.5 billion and the net loss was $4.8 billion, which shows how much heavier the first quarter was.
Revenue came in well ahead of expectations. Fortune put the Wall Street consensus at $6.9 billion and Yahoo Finance at $6.8 billion, so the beat was roughly $900 million to $1 billion depending on the data provider. Each of the three segments exceeded the estimates Yahoo Finance cited. The company ended the quarter with about $100 billion of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and a contracted backlog of $47.5 billion.
| Segment (Q2 2026) | Revenue | Operating income (loss) | Adjusted EBITDA | Capex |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connectivity (Starlink) | $4,291m | $1,656m | $2,597m | $1,367m |
| AI | $2,561m | ($1,257m) | $1,146m | $15,828m |
| Space | $962m | ($542m) | ($205m) | $1,174m |
| Group | $7,814m | ($143m) | $3,538m | $18,369m |
How profitable is Starlink on its own?
Starlink is clearly profitable. The Connectivity segment earned $1.656 billion of operating income on $4.291 billion of revenue, a margin of 38.6%, and about $2.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA. Analysts had expected a margin nearer 35.9%, according to Fortune.
Subscriber growth is the main driver. Starlink ended the quarter with 12.0 million subscribers, double the figure a year earlier and 1.7 million more than at the end of March, which management described as its best quarter for additions. Regolith reported about 10,200 satellites in service across 167 countries and territories. Revenue grew 66%, slower than subscribers, because the customer mix is shifting toward cheaper plans and lower-income markets. Yahoo Finance noted that average revenue per subscriber fell 22% year on year, and Fortune put the figure at about $66 a month.
The more interesting line is enterprise and government. Fortune reported $1.8 billion of revenue from those customers in the quarter, up 108% year on year, and the company cited more than $6 billion of multi-year US government agreements. New airline customers named around the results included American, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus. Elon Musk told analysts he expects enterprise revenue to exceed the consumer business over time. For anyone selling connectivity to airlines, ships or defence ministries, that is the competitive statement that matters most in the whole release.
Why is the launch business losing money?
The Space segment lost $542 million at the operating level on $962 million of revenue because it carries the cost of developing Starship while selling most of its Falcon launches to Starlink internally. Third-party launch revenue is real, but small next to the group.
Segment revenue grew 29% year on year and beat the $835 million estimate Yahoo Finance cited. The release recorded 78 launches in the first half of 2026. A large share of those flights carried Starlink satellites, and that activity shows up as cost for the Connectivity segment and capital investment, not as external launch revenue. What remains in Space is commercial and government launch, Dragon missions and Starship development. Segment capex was $1.17 billion in the quarter.
The practical reading is that launch at SpaceX is now an enabling function. It is 12% of group revenue. Its job is to lower the cost of putting Starlink and, eventually, computing hardware into orbit. That reframes the competitive question for other launch companies. SpaceX does not need its rockets to earn a margin from outside customers, which is a difficult rival to price against. We look at how one competitor is responding in our analysis of the Rocket Lab and Synspective Electron launch deal, and at what the first orbital mission changes in our piece on the Starship flight that deployed Starlink V3 satellites.
How much is SpaceX spending on AI, and why did the market react?
SpaceX spent $18.4 billion on capital expenditure in the quarter, of which $15.8 billion went to AI infrastructure. Analysts had expected about $13 billion. The shares fell roughly 7% after hours, even though revenue and profit beat forecasts.
To put the number in proportion, quarterly capex was about 2.4 times quarterly revenue. First-quarter capex had been $10.1 billion, so spending rose more than 80% in three months and reached $28.5 billion for the half year. Fortune calculated an annualised run rate of $73.5 billion against an analyst consensus of $48.7 billion for the full year. Nameplate computing capacity reached 1.4 gigawatts, up from 0.4 gigawatts a year earlier, and management told analysts it is targeting 2 gigawatts by the end of 2026.
The AI segment is growing quickly from that base. Revenue rose 247% to $2.56 billion, the operating loss narrowed to $1.26 billion from $2.47 billion in the first quarter, and adjusted EBITDA turned positive at $1.15 billion. The company signed $14.1 billion of cloud services agreements in the quarter and a further $6.7 billion early in the third quarter. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said an annualised revenue run rate of $100 billion by December was within reach, helped by those contracts and the pending acquisition of the coding company Cursor, which Not a Tesla App reported as a $60 billion deal.
What did management say about Starship and Starlink Mobile?
Management said Starship would soon carry operational Starlink V3 satellites, that Starlink Mobile would launch as a standalone service by the end of 2027, and that the internal target of $1 trillion in annual revenue had moved forward from 2031 to 2030.
On Starship, Musk said he considered the heat shield problem solved and floated the possibility of daily launches within a year. The company said about 1,000 V3 satellites would be needed to reach the next level of Starlink service by the second quarter of 2027. That schedule depends entirely on Starship flying often. The first orbital flight with 26 V3 satellites followed on 28 September, eight weeks after the call and about a month later than the end-of-August target mentioned at the time.
On mobile, the company outlined plans for Starlink Mobile, a standalone direct-to-device service intended to work without dead zones, according to Not a Tesla Appβs account of the call. Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer, sized the addressable revenue of the largest mobile operators at roughly $600 billion a year. Musk also argued that falling prices would not hurt, saying: “Even if our monetization per bit dropped by a factor of 10, that would still mean a 10x revenue increase.” Operators weighing partnerships should read that as a statement of intent on pricing. The regulatory side of that market is covered in our piece on the FCC direct-to-device spectrum proposal.
How has the stock performed since the IPO?
SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on 12 June 2026 at $135 a share and raised $85.7 billion, the largest IPO on record. The stock peaked above $225 within days, then fell by about half. It traded near $108 when the results came out.
TheStreet recorded an all-time high of $225.64 on 16 June and a low of $107.01 on 28 July, a decline of about 52%. On the day of the results the shares rose roughly 10% in the regular session, then dropped about 7% to 8% after the release as investors absorbed the capex figure. Fortune estimated that the company had shed about $500 billion of market value from a peak near $2 trillion.
Two technical factors added pressure. A lock-up covering roughly 900 million to 1 billion insider shares expired on 6 August, two days after the report, and TheStreet put short interest at about 35% of available shares. The company had also recently raised $25 billion in a bond offering, according to Fortune. None of this changes the operating picture, but it explains why a clear revenue beat produced a falling share price.
What does the report mean for competitors and suppliers?
It gives rivals a public benchmark. Any satellite broadband operator can now compare itself with a competitor that has 12 million subscribers, a 38.6% operating margin and $100 billion of cash. Any launch company can see that SpaceX runs launch at a loss by choice.
For satellite operators, the uncomfortable figure is the enterprise and government line growing at 108%. That is the segment where established operators such as SES and Eutelsat earn their best margins, and where Europe is trying to build an alternative through the programme we cover in IRISΒ² contracts and Europeβs β¬15.6 billion bet. Amazon Leo, which had about 330 satellites operational in early June 2026 according to Fierce Network, faces a rival that can fund price cuts from operating profit.
For launch providers, the message is mixed. SpaceX is the price setter, yet its own disclosures suggest Falcon capacity is increasingly spoken for by Starlink and government work. That leaves room for others, which is why the US government has kept seven companies on its main procurement vehicle, as we explain in our NSSL Phase 3 analysis. For component and subsystem suppliers, including businesses like the one described in our Rocket Lab company story, the capex line is an opportunity. Only $2.5 billion of it went to space and connectivity hardware in the quarter, but that is still more than most space companies earn in a year.
What are the main risks in the SpaceX model after this report?
The main risks are capital intensity, dependence on Starship, falling revenue per subscriber and concentration of decision-making. The quarter showed all four. None is new, but all are now measurable from public filings.
Capital intensity comes first. At the second-quarter pace the company would spend more than $70 billion a year, which is above its current annualised revenue. The $100 billion cash balance covers that for a while, and the cloud contracts provide some visibility, but the AI segment still lost $1.26 billion at the operating level. If demand for computing capacity softens, the hardware is already bought.
Starship is the second dependency. V3 satellites cannot fly on Falcon 9, so Starlink capacity growth, the mobile service and the orbital computing plans mentioned on the call all rely on a vehicle that reached orbit for the first time only in late September. Third, average revenue per subscriber is falling by more than a fifth a year, so subscriber growth has to keep outrunning price erosion. Finally, the long-range targets, including $1 trillion of revenue by 2030, are internal projections, not guidance in any formal sense. The results release itself contained no forward guidance.
What should operators and investors watch next?
Watch third-quarter capex, Starship flight frequency, Starlink net additions and average revenue per subscriber, and the close of the Cursor acquisition. Those five items will show whether the second quarter was a peak in spending or the new normal.
On the space side specifically, three indicators matter. The first is how quickly Starship follows its 28 September orbital flight with another V3 deployment, because the company tied its next service tier to about 1,000 V3 satellites by mid-2027. The second is whether Space segment losses narrow once Starship carries revenue-generating payload regularly. The third is government revenue: SpaceX won $1.6 billion of US Space Force launch orders on 29 July, a few days before the report, and it holds multi-year government agreements worth more than $6 billion.
For readers tracking the wider sector, the report also resets valuation references. Listed space companies are now compared with a peer that publishes margins every quarter. Our Planet Labs company story and the space company stories archive give context on how smaller listed operators frame their own unit economics.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did SpaceX report its first earnings as a public company?
On 4 August 2026, covering the second quarter of 2026. SpaceX had listed on Nasdaq on 12 June 2026 at $135 a share, raising $85.7 billion.
Is SpaceX profitable?
Not at the net level. It reported a net loss of $541 million for the quarter and $4.8 billion for the first half of 2026. Adjusted EBITDA was positive at $3.54 billion, and the Starlink segment earned $1.66 billion of operating income.
How many Starlink subscribers does SpaceX have?
The company reported 12.0 million subscribers at the end of June 2026, double the number a year earlier, with 1.7 million added during the quarter.
How much of SpaceX revenue comes from rockets?
The Space segment contributed $962 million, about 12% of the $7.81 billion total. Starlink contributed about 55% and AI about 33%.
Sources
- SpaceX: Second Quarter 2026 Results (press release, PDF)
- Fortune: SpaceX revenue surges 92% to $7.8 billion
- Fortune: Capex weighs on SpaceX debut earnings
- Yahoo Finance: SpaceX Q2 2026 earnings
- Fierce Network: FCC waives Amazon Leo July 2026 deployment deadline
- Regolith: SpaceX Q2 2026 earnings summary
- Not a Tesla App: Highlights from the SpaceX earnings call
- TheStreet: SpaceX wins $1.6 billion Space Force launch contract
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