GoKawiilSpaceX hosted its first-ever public earnings call since its record-breaking IPO on Tuesday. And while billionaire CEO Elon Musk spun a web of lofty promises (as he is wont to do) about a future moon catapult and a space-based economy, it seems the company’s more practical businesses are the immediate focus now that it has a responsibility to shareholders.
The future of SpaceX is directly tied to its satellites and large language models. SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity business, AI data centers and future Grok models are the primary focus over the next year of business, as they generate the greatest amount of revenue for the company. The Starship and Falcon rockets received far less time in the spotlight.
Since its founding, SpaceX has never posted a profit. The company’s massive valuation is based on ballooning revenue projections for the next half-decade of operations. Now that public investors have entered the picture, it’s becoming more important to actually deliver on some of these promises sooner rather than later.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets may be some of its flashiest assets, but the company’s space unit isn’t currently profitable. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Musk’s big numbers and lofty promises
During the earnings call on Tuesday, Musk threw out a whole bunch of big numbers and vague promises about how SpaceX plans to expand its Starship, Starlink and AI businesses over the next 10 years.
By his own admission, many of the rapid-fire claims Musk listed during the earnings call sounded “super sci-fi” and “totally nuts,” especially when he started talking about building a hardware catapult on the moon. It’s always good to take Musk’s promises with a shaker’s worth of salt. But sifting through the billionaire’s lofty promises still usually reveals a kernel of truth about the direction his companies are heading, even if the final product never comes to fruition.
Musk reiterated that SpaceX’s Starship and Falcon projects are important to the company. The CEO said he wants the company’s rockets to deliver 10 million tons of hardware into orbit per year, though he didn’t provide a timeline for that goal. SpaceX rockets currently deliver 2,500 tons of hardware into orbit per year, according to Musk.
But the lion’s share of his prepared statement focused on Starlink V3 satellite technology and future Grok AI capabilities, echoing the more grounded financial realities espoused by SpaceX’s other key executives during the call.
Musk said the latest generation of Starlink satellites is 10 times more capable than the V2 satellites, but didn’t provide any specific performance metrics. He said that SpaceX expects to launch 10 times as many V3 satellites, which “would mean a roughly two-order-of-magnitude increase in delivered bandwidth.”
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