SpaceX $SPCX just put up Q3 numbers and they’re strong.
Revenue hit $14.6 billion, up 161% from last year. They made $4.4 billion in net income after losing money a year ago, and adjusted EBITDA came in at $8.8 billion.
Starlink is still doing the heavy lifting on the profitable side. Connectivity brought in $5.25 billion, up 69%, and the operating profit in that segment almost doubled. They added another 1.6 million consumer subscribers and are now at 13.6 million. ARPU even ticked up a bit to $69, which is nice to see after the earlier international expansion pressure.
The real jump this quarter came from the AI side. Super Intelligence revenue landed at $7.56 billion. They’re at 1.7 GW of compute now and still pouring a lot of capital into it. Capex was almost $20 billion, most of it going into that build-out.
The launch business was “weaker” on the revenue side at $1.77 billion, but the more interesting thing is that Starship finally flew a revenue mission and put up 26 of the new V3 satellites. One flight added about ten times the capacity of a normal Falcon 9 Starlink launch. That’s the kind of step-change that starts to matter if they can keep repeating it.
From where I sit, the story is becoming clearer and clearer. Starlink is generating real operating leverage, the AI infrastructure is starting to produce serious revenue even while they’re still spending heavily, and Starship is beginning to show why the economics can improve. They’re sitting on roughly $90 billion in cash and securities, so they have room to keep investing.
I like the position. The next few quarters will tell us how fast the AI contracts turn into recurring cash flow and how quickly Starship capacity actually scales. For now the direction looks right.
Long term long $SPCX