SpaceX Q3 Results: Elon Musk-led firm blows past expectations, explores merger with Tesla

Elon Musk-led SpaceX reported its third quarter results after market closing hours on Wall Street on Tuesday, October 20 local time, which were way better than expectations across parameters. The stock jumped over 8% in extended trading after the results announcement.

SpaceX reported revenue of $14.58 billion during the quarter, higher than estimates of $12.72 billion. On a year-on-year basis, SpaceX reported a 161% revenue growth. Earnings Per Share of $0.45 also turned out to be higher than the estimate of $0.13.

Net profit for the quarter stood at

$4.4 billion, while analysts had pegged a $1.8 billion

figure. During the same quarter last year, SpaceX had reported a net loss of $1.05 billion. Operating profit during the quarter stood at $2.8 billion.

Bret Johnsen, the company's CFO mentioned on the earnings call that revenue from the first quarter of 2027 will be between $33 billion to $37 billion, way above the average analyst estimate of $22.2 billion. He attributed the projection to increased visibility in the company's compute contract pipeline over the next six months.

Most of SpaceX's revenue and profit came from its connectivity segment. Starlink's subscriber base grew to 13.6 million during the quarter from 12 million last year and revenue from the connectivity business also grew by 69% year-on-year to $5.25 billion, higher than the $4.84 billion estimate.

Revenue from SpaceX's AI business, or what the company now calls "Super Intelligence" surged nine-fold from last year to $7.56 billion. The company has become a major compute and infrastructure supplier to Anthropic, Alphabet and others, also acquiring Cursor along the way to boost its AI-powered coding tool segment.

xAI also turned in a net profit of $431 million during the quarter, compared to a loss of $1.7 billion reported during the year-ago period.

During the earnings call, Elon Musk highlighted that the idea of merging both SpaceX and Tesla is a good one and that the boards of both the companies have formed special committees to look into the proposal. Tesla will be reporting its own results later today.

Shares of SpaceX had closed at $147.79 in regular trading on Tuesday, just above their IPO price of $135. The stock jumped over 8% in extended trading. The stock has a weightage of nearly 2.82% on the Nasdaq after the rebalancing exercise and the afterhours surge in the stock has also provided a boost to the Nasdaq futures.