SpaceX delivered its first quarterly results as a public company after Tuesday’s close, and the top line cleared Wall Street by roughly a billion dollars.

The company reported second-quarter revenue of $7.81 billion, up 92% year over year, against a Street consensus of $6.93 billion. It posted a loss of nine cents per share versus an expected loss of 24 cents. Revenue rose from $4.1 billion a year earlier, and operating losses narrowed to $143 million from $970 million as operating income at Starlink swelled 79%. The net loss narrowed to $541 million from $1 billion.

Adjusted EBITDA came in at $3.5 billion against a $2.0 billion consensus, and second-quarter capital expenditures were $18.37 billion, slightly below the $18.58 billion expected.

Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in the release that growth accelerated across every segment, citing “significant margin expansion led by our new AI compute agreements.”

Starlink Is Still The Engine

Connectivity revenue climbed 66% year over year and 32% sequentially to $4.29 billion. Starlink subscribers doubled from a year ago to 12 million, including 1.7 million net additions in the quarter. Enterprise and government revenue rose 108% to $1.81 billion, outpacing the consumer business’s 44% growth, and connectivity operating income jumped 79% to $1.66 billion. Connectivity adjusted EBITDA reached $2.60 billion against $2.41 billion estimated.

SpaceX expanded its airline footprint with agreements involving American Airlines, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus. Starlink now serves 167 countries, and the company has flown 78 launches year to date, including two Starship V3 test flights over the last 90 days.

The soft spot is what each of those subscribers is worth. Average revenue per user was $66, flat with the prior quarter but down sharply from $85 a year ago. That is a 22% decline, which the company attributed to entering more international markets and rolling out lower-priced plans. Subscriber counts doubled; revenue per subscriber fell by roughly a fifth. Both facts are in the same release.

The AI Segment Turned A Corner

A wave of new cloud-computing contracts pushed the AI segment into positive adjusted EBITDA territory for the first time, with $14.1 billion in new AI contracts booked. AI revenue more than tripled and segment losses nearly halved, though the AI operating loss still came in at $1.26 billion. Total backlog reached $47.5 billion.

That is the number that matters most for the equity story. Investor anxiety over capital expenditures and the return on enormous spending had weighed on the stock and on the broader tech complex for weeks before Tuesday’s rally. SpaceX put roughly $3 billion into Starship research and development in 2025 and another $930 million in the first quarter of 2026. The company is now showing a paying customer base attached to the AI buildout rather than spending alone.

The Stock, And Thursday

Shares closed at $125.33, up 9.4% on Tuesday — the best day since June 15, when the stock rallied 20%. They fell about 4% in after-hours trading following the release.

The stock remains below the $135 IPO price and more than 45% off the $225.64 high reached on June 16, days after the June 11 listing that raised $85.7 billion in the largest initial public offering in history.

The bigger event is two days out. Under a staged lock-up agreement, 20% of eligible insider and rank-and-file employee shares — up to 911.5 million — unlock two trading days after this earnings report, with further 7% tranches releasing every 15 to 20 days through late 2026. Musk’s controlling stake and key executive shares stay restricted under a full one-year lock-up until June 12, 2027. Short sellers held 32.2% of the publicly tradable float heading in, according to S3.

Retail has been the offsetting bid. Mom-and-pop traders have been net buyers every single trading day since the June IPO, according to VandaTrack.

What Comes Next

SpaceX is planning a large AI chip manufacturing plant called Terafab in East Texas alongside Tesla and Intel, a facility projected to cost as much as $119 billion at full buildout according to public hearing notices filed in Grimes County. Musk said on social media that the company will attempt to catch a Starship upper stage with the tower arms at Starbase on the next flight, barring problems found in mission data review.

Investors were also listening for comment on a possible SpaceX-Tesla combination after a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a separation of the China business ahead of a potential deal. Musk called the report inaccurate, though he has previously declined to rule out a tie-up.

The quarter answered the question it needed to answer: the core businesses generate real cash while the development programs burn it. Whether that holds through 911 million newly tradable shares is a different question, and it gets asked Thursday.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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