Coverage spread: 2 sources — 1 left · 1 international
Lean ratings via AllSides / Media Bias-Fact-Check. How this works.
Where they agree
- SpaceX reported Q2 revenue of about $7.8bn, up roughly 92% year-over-year, beating Wall Street forecasts.
- The company posted a net loss of $541m, smaller than expected and down from a bigger loss a year earlier.
- SpaceX’s stock has fallen sharply since its record-setting June IPO, which had briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
- Starlink/connectivity remains the company’s main profit driver, while it keeps spending heavily on Starship, Starlink expansion and AI infrastructure.
Where they differ
- Al Jazeera details specific new contracts and technical milestones (the $6bn Starshield deal, two Starship V3 launches, the Nvidia partnership for Starmind satellites) and notes ongoing lawsuits over Grok generating nonconsensual sexualized images.
- The Guardian breaks out segment-level revenue figures (space, connectivity, AI) against analyst forecasts and includes direct investor-call quotes from Musk, including his moon-city ambitions.
- The Guardian frames the stock decline more dramatically, citing a 24% drop and nearly $500bn in erased market cap along with an analyst quote calling investors ‘jittery’; Al Jazeera cites an 8% decline since the IPO.
- The Guardian adds a comparison to Meta’s revenue and profit to contextualize how far SpaceX is from overall profitability, a comparison Al Jazeera does not make.
What SpaceX reported
SpaceX released its first quarterly earnings as a public company on Tuesday, covering the three months through June. The company posted revenue of $7.81bn, up roughly 92 percent from the same period a year earlier, and ahead of analyst forecasts that had ranged from about $6.8bn to $6.93bn. Despite the growth, SpaceX is still not profitable: it reported a net loss of $541m, or 9 cents per share. That loss was smaller than Wall Street had expected and an improvement from the roughly $1bn loss recorded in the same quarter last year.
Broken down by business line, space (rockets and launches) brought in $962m, connectivity — mainly Starlink — brought in $4.29bn, and the AI unit brought in $2.56bn, all above analyst projections. The AI division, which includes xAI’s Grok models, posted an operating loss of $1.2bn on its own. SpaceX ended the quarter holding $100bn in cash, according to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Where the money is going
The company said it spent $18.37bn during the quarter on expanding Starlink and Starship, plus building out AI infrastructure. Elon Musk said the company’s planned “Starmind” AI satellites are expected to launch next year, and SpaceX announced a partnership with Nvidia to supply chips for those orbital compute satellites. The quarter also included $6bn in new U.S. government contracts for Starshield, the company’s national-security satellite system, and two successful test launches of the Starship V3 rocket. On an investor call, Musk called it “another milestone year” and touted longer-term ambitions including a moon city, which he acknowledged sounds like science fiction but insisted “it’s gonna happen.”
Starlink remains the company’s only consistently profitable segment and its main financial engine, funding Musk’s broader push to turn SpaceX into what he describes as an AI-first business — one that goes beyond selling computing capacity into developing its own frontier AI models, consumer and enterprise software, and eventually data centers in orbit. The AI arm also released its most powerful Grok model during the quarter, even as Grok faces lawsuits in multiple countries over its use to generate sexualized images of people without consent.
The stock’s rocky reaction
SpaceX’s June IPO was the largest stock market debut in history, valuing the company at around $2tn and briefly making Musk the world’s first trillionaire — a title that didn’t last. Since the debut, shares have fallen sharply: reporting puts the decline at roughly 8 percent to 24 percent depending on the measurement period, with one estimate saying the stock is down about 50 percent from its post-IPO peak and now trading below its IPO price, erasing close to $500bn in market value. Analysts pointed to a broader AI-sector sell-off and investor doubts about whether Musk oversold the company’s prospects in space travel and colonization.
The earnings reaction was volatile. Shares jumped as much as 9.4 percent during Tuesday’s regular trading session on the stronger-than-expected numbers, but then reversed in after-hours trading, falling more than 7 to 8 percent, which coverage attributed largely to investor unease over the company’s heavy capital spending.
Why the numbers matter
This was investors’ first real window into SpaceX’s finances since it went public, and it landed at a tense moment for the stock. Analysts quoted in coverage described investors as “jittery” ahead of the report, given the stock’s slide below its IPO price, and said the results could shape the stock’s direction going forward. For comparison, SpaceX’s full prior-year revenue was $18.7bn with a $4.3bn operating loss — meaning a single quarter now accounts for a large share of last year’s entire annual revenue, underscoring how fast the company says it’s growing even as it continues to burn cash on rockets, satellites and AI infrastructure.
Sources
Featured photo: Alexander Hatley from Spring, Texas, USA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)