SpaceX Reports Strong Q3 2026 Results as Elon Musk Outlines Ambitious Plans

SpaceX released its financial results for the third quarter of 2026 on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, reporting $14.6 billion in revenue, which represents a 161% increase compared to the same period in the previous year. The company broadcast its live video earnings call from its Starlink facility in Bastrop, Texas, featuring CEO Elon Musk and other company executives.

During the earnings call, the company reported an operating income of $2.8 billion, net income of $4.4 billion, and an adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 billion. This marked a significant turnaround from a net loss of $1.1 billion reported in the prior year quarter. Executive commentary emphasized that the revenue surge was fueled by ongoing momentum in the connectivity segment and a clear inflection point in the company's super intelligence business.

Musk announced during his opening remarks that SpaceX will attempt to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage during the upcoming Flight 15 launch test. The company previously achieved historic milestones by successfully catching Super Heavy boosters with the launch tower arms at Starbase, Texas, during the Flight 5, Flight 7, and Flight 8 tests.

The connectivity segment delivered strong results, with revenue growing 69% year-over-year. By the end of the third quarter of 2026, Starlink reached 13.6 million subscribers across 174 countries, boasting an average revenue per user of $69. Additionally, the company successfully launched its first revenue-generating Starship mission during the quarter, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites which provided approximately ten times the downlink capacity of a Falcon 9 launch.

SpaceX also highlighted rapid scaling within its Super Intelligence segment, noting that nameplate compute reached 1.7 gigawatts as of September 30, 2026. Musk stated that he spends four days a week at the company's Memphis artificial intelligence data centers to scale compute capacity. The growth was further supported by cloud services agreements, the acquisition of Cursor, and software applications including the Grok bot.

Looking forward, Musk projected that enterprise deployments of the Grok bot and expanding super intelligence infrastructure could drive annual recurring revenue for SpaceX to somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion by the end of 2027. He noted that bandwidth demands are expected to multiply significantly due to the communication requirements of advanced artificial intelligence agents.

In related financial developments concerning stakeholders, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison reportedly put up shares of Tesla and SpaceX as collateral this year to secure personal bank loans. According to filings cited by The Wall Street Journal, the borrowed funds helped finance his son David Ellison's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The companies involved have not officially confirmed the stock pledges, and specific loan amounts and share counts have not been made public.