SpaceX's First Earnings Call: A Trillion-Dollar Rocket With No Brakes
Numbers below are current as of the evening of August 4, 2026, right after the call. This was SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company, so there's no real earnings history to compare it to yet. Prices are still moving fast.
What Is This Article About
SpaceX went public in June 2026 in the largest IPO in history, and today it held its first ever earnings call as a public company. This article covers what was said on the call, what went right, what went wrong, and then does real math on the valuation, including just how big this company's price tag has gotten. It ends with my own take on whether it's worth buying. This is not financial advice, just my own reading of the numbers.
What Was Discussed in the Q2 2026 Call
SpaceX reported $7.81 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 92% from a year ago and well above the $6.93 billion analysts expected. The company is still losing money, but the loss shrank a lot. Net loss came in at $541 million, or 9 cents a share, much smaller than the 26 cent loss analysts had modeled and a big improvement from the $1 billion loss a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $3.5 billion, nearly double the $2.0 billion expected.
Starlink, the satellite internet business, passed 12 million subscribers and its connectivity segment posted $2.60 billion in adjusted EBITDA, ahead of the $2.41 billion expected. CFO Bret Johnsen said SpaceX is on pace to hit $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by the end of the year, and mentioned the company has already contracted an additional $6.7 billion in cloud services revenue that starts ramping in October. Elon Musk also said on the call that Nvidia will be SpaceX's exclusive supplier for its AI chip needs, tying the company's new AI infrastructure push to Nvidia's hardware.
Despite all of that beating expectations, the stock fell after hours. The reason given across most coverage was capital expenditures, SpaceX is spending an enormous amount of money building out Starship, Starlink, and now AI data centers, and that spending came in heavier than investors wanted to see.
What Are the Wins
Revenue beat estimates by a wide margin and grew 92% year over year. The loss per share was far smaller than expected, a sign the business is getting closer to breakeven. Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled what analysts modeled. Starlink crossed 12 million subscribers and its profitability came in ahead of plan. On top of the financials, SpaceX locked in a large new cloud services contract worth $6.7 billion and set a public target of $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by year end, which, if hit, would be a massive jump from where the company sits today.
What Are the Losses
SpaceX is still not profitable. It lost $541 million this quarter, on top of a $4.28 billion loss in the first quarter of the year. Capital spending is enormous, and that spending spike is exactly what spooked investors and sent the stock lower after hours, even with a clean beat on nearly every headline number. Free cash flow over the last twelve months is deeply negative, around negative $19.8 billion, because the company is pouring money into Starship, satellite manufacturing, and now AI infrastructure all at once. The balance sheet also shows more debt than cash, about $30.6 billion in debt against $23.7 billion in cash, putting the company in a net debt position rather than a net cash position, which is unusual for a company this highly valued.
The stock itself has also had a rough couple of months. It IPO'd at $135 a share in June, spiked to an all-time high of $225.64 within days, and had fallen more than 45% from that high heading into today's report. Today's after-hours drop adds to that slide.
Analysis
This is where it gets interesting, because SpaceX doesn't fit neatly into normal valuation math the way a profitable company does.
Trailing P/E: Not applicable. SpaceX lost money over the last twelve months, so there is no meaningful price-to-earnings ratio to calculate. Any company that isn't profitable doesn't have a real trailing P/E, full stop.
Forward P/E: Analysts currently model SpaceX moving toward a small profit next year, which produces a forward P/E of roughly 190x. I'd treat this number with real caution. When a company is right at the edge of breakeven, tiny changes in the earnings estimate swing the P/E wildly, so a number like 190x is more of a reflection of "barely profitable" than a useful yardstick. Still, even acknowledging that, it signals the market is pricing in an extraordinary amount of future growth to justify today's share price.
A better measure here is price-to-sales, since the company isn't profitable yet.
Using the after-hours market cap of roughly $1.56 trillion and trailing twelve-month revenue of $19.3 billion, that's a price-to-sales ratio of about 81x. For comparison, even the hottest AI software companies typically trade in the 15 to 25 times sales range. SpaceX is trading at multiples of that, on top of being a capital-intensive hardware and infrastructure business, not a software company with fat margins. On a forward basis, using next year's expected revenue, the multiple comes down to around 33x sales, still very rich by almost any standard.
Now let's talk about the market cap itself, because the number is genuinely hard to wrap your head around.
At today's after-hours price, SpaceX is worth around $1.56 trillion. Here's what that looks like next to some other numbers:
NASA's entire annual budget is about $25 billion. SpaceX's market cap is roughly 62 times NASA's yearly budget.The European Space Agency runs on about $8.4 billion a year. SpaceX is worth about 185 times that.Add up every government space budget on Earth, the US, China, Europe, Japan, everyone, and you get to roughly $80 billion a year in total global government space spending. SpaceX's market cap is close to 20 times that entire combined figure.The entire global space economy, every satellite operator, launch company, and ground equipment maker on the planet combined, generates an estimated $626 to $650 billion a year in revenue. SpaceX alone is valued at more than double the size of that whole industry's yearly output.Against other public aerospace companies, SpaceX is worth roughly 10 times Boeing's market cap, about 14 times Lockheed Martin's, and somewhere between 19 and 39 times Rocket Lab's, depending on the day. Add Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Rocket Lab together and their combined value still doesn't come close to SpaceX by itself.
I think calling this valuation "ridiculously high" is fair. It's not that SpaceX isn't a great business, it clearly is, but the stock price has moved into territory where it's being valued like it already dominates AI infrastructure, satellite internet, and space transport combined, years before any of that is fully proven out.
What Did I Understand From Today's Call
The actual business performed well. Revenue beat, losses shrank faster than expected, Starlink is scaling nicely, and there's real, contracted demand for the new AI infrastructure push, not just a slide in an investor deck. That part of the story is legitimately impressive for a company only two months into being public.
But the stock reaction tells you the market had priced in near perfection, and heavy capital spending was enough to break that spell. This looks a lot like the AMD story from earlier today: a real beat, followed by a sell-off, because the bar was set absurdly high going in.
Is This a Good Company to Invest in Right Now
As a company, SpaceX is remarkable. It has no real competitor at its scale in launch, a fast-growing and increasingly profitable satellite internet business, and it's now stepping into AI infrastructure with actual contracts behind it, not just ambition. If you're evaluating the underlying business on its own, it's hard not to be impressed.
As a stock at a $1.56 trillion valuation, this is a much harder call. You are paying for years of flawless execution across three different businesses at once, launch, satellite internet, and AI infrastructure, while the company is still burning cash and carries more debt than cash on hand. The gap between where the stock trades and where the actual current financials would justify is enormous by my own math. That doesn't mean the stock can't keep climbing, momentum and story-driven stocks can stay expensive for a long time, but it does mean there's very little room for anything to go wrong.
Final Thoughts on Whether to Invest or Not
If you already own shares from the IPO, today's numbers were genuinely good, and there's nothing here that breaks the long-term story. If you're thinking about buying in fresh at today's price, understand you're not buying a value stock, you're buying a bet on Elon Musk and his team continuing to execute at a nearly impossible level across rockets, satellites, and now AI data centers, all while the stock already prices in a huge amount of that success happening. I'd also want to watch how the stock trades over the next few months as more lockup shares become sellable, since that alone could create pressure independent of how the business is actually doing.
Personally, this is not a stock I'd chase right after a first earnings report with this much valuation risk already baked in. If I wanted exposure, I'd rather wait and see how it trades through the lockup expiration later this year before deciding whether to build a position, and even then, I'd size it small given how far the current price sits from what the underlying numbers support today.
As Buffet would say, this stock for me goes into a Too-Hard pile!
Disclaimer:
I am not a financial advisor. This article is based on publicly available earnings data and my own personal analysis and views. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research or talk to a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
