The numbers
Revenue $7.81bn, +92% YoY from $4.1bn, against ~$6.9bn consensus;
EPS: loss of $0.09/share vs -$0.26 expected; net loss narrowed to $541m from $1.0bn;
Adjusted EBITDA $3.5bn vs $2.0bn consensus.
All three segments beat 🚀
And then: capex $18.37bn, more than six times year-ago levels, of which $15.83bn went to AI — against a $13.22bn FactSet estimates 🔥.
Segment split:
-> Connectivity $4.29bn (+66% YoY), 1.7m net adds with ARPU held flat at $66, enterprise/government revenue +108%, Starlink now at 12 million subscribers.
-> AI $2.6bn (+247% YoY), first quarter of positive segment adjusted EBITDA at $1.1bn, helped by $1.6bn of incremental Colossus cloud services revenue. -> Space only $962m with a $205m EBITDA loss — Starship remains an R&D line, not a business.
🤔 Why the stock reversed
Shares closed +9.43% at $125.33, then fell to ~$114.6 after hours — the entire day's rally erased.
➡️ Reuters framed it precisely: the concern is cash flow, or the absence of it, with analysts fearing the burn rate forces a return to markets for equity and/or debt; the bonds have already been weak, and 911.5 million insider and employee shares come free on Thursday.
⚠️ Management guided Q3 and Q4 capex to broadly match Q2 — so roughly $55bn of capex in a single year against a $100bn cash pile, most of which is IPO proceeds.
Set against that, Johnsen's claim of a sub-one-year payback on compute deployments, $6.7bn of additional cloud contracts signed in the first weeks of Q3, a $100bn ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) target for December, and the $1trn revenue projection pulled forward from 2031 to 2030.
😎 Classic Musk: the promise lengthens as the cash burn steepens.
With 34% short interest on the float, the after-hours move is also positioning, not just fundamentals.
‼️ Market drivers to carry forward
- Nvidia exclusivity is the cleanest read-across. Musk committed SpaceX to Vera Rubin processors exclusively, and NVDA rose ~2% after hours.
- A target of 15–20GW of power and cooling online by end-2027, deliberately built ahead of GPU supply — that is a bid for turbines, transformers and grid capacity as much as for silicon.
- Memory is the bottleneck, and the tape agrees. The Kospi added 4.0% overnight led by SK Hynix and Samsung, shrugging off SpaceX and AMD.
👉 My read: SpaceX is now the purest listed proxy for the AI capex question — a business with genuine cash-generative assets (Starlink at 40%+ segment margins) funding an option on compute at a burn rate no cash flow currently supports.
Thursday's lockup is the near-term technical risk; the $100bn December ARR figure is the near-term fundamental test.
Anyone who owns this at 1.6trn is underwriting Starship reusability and Starlink V3 economics, not this quarter's numbers.
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