SpaceX Reports Lots of Red Ink and Makes Big Promises

Question: How is the 24-year-old SpaceX like a young startup? It’s burning twice as much cash as it brings in as revenue! That’s one takeaway from SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company, in which the company revealed it burned $16 billion in the second quarter, on $7.8 billion in revenue. That’s thanks to a whopping $18.4 billion in capital expenditures, mostly due to SpaceX’s AI data center expansion.

And like a young startup, SpaceX has big ambitions. On the company’s earnings call with analysts, CEO Elon Musk claimed it was now expecting to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, a year earlier than it had projected before its IPO, and there was a chance it could hit that threshold by 2029. That’s a big claim, considering that first-half revenue was only $12.5 billion. True, finance chief Bret Johnsen said SpaceX’s annualized revenue rate would hit $100 billion by the end of this year. But ARR is one month’s revenue multiplied by 12. It’s not a real metric (and Musk emphasized that the $1 trillion projection was revenue, not ARR).