SpaceX’s Future Plans Hinge Heavily on Starlink and Grok

SpaceX held its first public earnings call since its record-breaking IPO on Tuesday, where CEO Elon Musk focused on the company's Starlink satellite business and future Grok AI models as primary revenue drivers, while also making bold promises about a moon catapult and delivering 10 million tons of hardware into orbit annually. SpaceX, which has never posted a profit, now faces pressure from public investors to deliver on its revenue projections, with Starlink reaching 12 million subscribers this quarter and plans to launch 10 times as many V3 satellites, which are 10 times more capable than V2.

SpaceX hosted its first-ever public earnings call since its record-breaking IPO https://www.cnet.com/news-live/spacex-ipo-live-starlink-xai-going-public-2/ on Tuesday. And while billionaire CEO Elon Musk spun a web of lofty promises as he is wont to do https://www.cnet.com/tech/spacex-explained-8-things-that-matter-the-most-after-the-ipo/ :~:text=Tied%20to%20Musk%E2%80%99s,R2%20unit.%E2%80%9C 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 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/science/spacex-rocket-moon-crash.html 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 https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/elon-musk-projects-1-trillion-220033413.html 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. 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 https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-elon-musks-broken-promises/ . 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 https://www.cnet.com/science/space/satellite-overcrowding-space-junk-low-earth-orbit-starlink/ 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.” Within the next decade, Musk said, “Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where SpaceX is allowed to operate.” It’s a bold prediction without much backing, despite the fact that the service reached its 12 million subscriber milestone this quarter. Musk said SpaceX’s physical computing power — its AI data centers and the supercomputers housed within them — is being built out and deployed faster than competitors and that the company is “providing compute to others,” likely referring to the data center deal https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/elon-musk-and-anthropic-on-good-enough-terms-to-sign-a-major-data-center-deal/ inked between SpaceX and Anthropic. SpaceX expects to end the year with over two gigawatts of computing capacity, but Musk initially said during the call that the company will end 2027 with “closer to 10 gigawatts of compute than 5 gigawatts of compute.” Later, during the investor Q&A, Musk said the company was aiming to have 15 gigawatts of AI computing capacity online by the end of next year. Grok AI is also an outsized focus for SpaceX, even amid litigation https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/grok-ai-deepfake-porn-teen-girls-lawsuit-march-2026/ surrounding the LLM’s reported creation https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/grok-x-ai-elon-musk-deepfakes.html of more than 4.4 million nonconsensual sexual images. Musk said that two more Grok models would launch within the next two months, after which he promised that the company would dramatically improve its AI development cadence. According to Musk, Grok 5 will come out sometime this year. Musk told one investor that the expected timeline for SpaceX to reach $1 trillion of yearly revenue has been moved up from 2031 — he now believes that figure could be achieved as early as 2029. That claim would require the company to achieve unseen exponential growth numbers https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/elon-musk-projects-1-trillion-220033413.html to come true. Though Musk’s specific claims are dubious at best, SpaceX is definitely adding a lot of hardware to its balance sheet and creating avenues to earn additional money. The here and now: How is SpaceX making money? SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and chief financial officer Bret Johnsen shared details about Starlink and Grok’s revenue numbers and performance metrics. While the combined yearly revenue of all of SpaceX’s business tallies up to roughly $7.8 billion, the aerospace and AI units are operating at a loss. SpaceX’s connectivity business is the only part of the company to turn a profit — Starlink brought in $1.66 billion more than it cost to operate this year. Connectivity growth was due to record Starlink subscriber numbers as well as a “sharp increase in enterprise and government revenue,” according to Johnsen. Starlink added more than 1.7 million new subscribers during this quarter, a figure representing over 10% of the service’s total customers. SpaceX will likely try to ink more contracts with corporations and governments for internet service in the near future. “We believe revenue from these enterprise markets has the potential to reach a scale at least comparable, but likely to exceed our consumer business as we continue to gain market share,” Shotwell said. She pointed to recent airline partnerships https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/american-airlines-plans-starlink-installations-2027/ as examples of the type of deals SpaceX will continue to pursue. Shotwell said the planned rollout of Starlink Mobile https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/could-starlink-be-your-next-wireless-carrier-elon-musk-thinks-so/ next year will make the company’s connectivity segment even more financially viable. “The big three mobile providers in the United States, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, make roughly $600 billion between them a year,” said Shotwell. “I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better.” Despite the controversies surrounding xAI and the net losses incurred by SpaceX’s AI unit, Grok is another of the primary driving forces behind SpaceX’s revenue growth. Johnsen said X subscriptions have increased as more people adopt Grok into their daily activities. It’s still unclear how SpaceX plans to make its AI unit profitable, despite the fact that Musk told an investor that he thinks his models will be able to handle any digital job by the end of next year. If the company decides to pivot in the future, however, its physical computing capacity might be leveraged to create another stream of revenue in a deal not dissimilar to the one SpaceX struck with Anthropic. The future of SpaceX The first SpaceX earnings call provided a much clearer path forward for the company. While its IPO valuation largely hinged on Musk’s cult of personality https://fortune.com/2023/02/10/steve-wozniak-says-elon-musk-cult-leader-like-steve-jobs/ and ambitious plans for a mission to Mars https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/mars , immediate investment in satellites and AI hardware put some grounded physical assets on the balance sheet. Despite bringing in $2.56 billion in revenue, SpaceX’s AI unit has bled $1.26 billion so far this year. That loss alone accounts for more than 75% of Starlink’s yearly profits. Now, SpaceX is becoming increasingly ingrained in the circular AI economy https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals/ . During the call, Musk announced that all of his company’s future AI computing power will be derived from Nvidia hardware. A partnership with what is potentially the linchpin company for the AI industry https://marketwise.com/investing/nvidia-is-becoming-central-bank-of-ai-weighs-backstop-openai-data-center/ indicates that SpaceX’s AI spending will only ramp up in the coming years.