SpaceX reported its third-quarter 2026 results after the market closed on Tuesday, October 20. It was the company’s second quarterly report since its June IPO, and it beat the numbers Wall Street had been watching for. We previewed the consensus expectations yesterday. Here’s what SpaceX actually reported.
The headline numbers
- Revenue: $14.58 billion, up 161% from $5.58 billion a year earlier and up from $7.81 billion in Q2.
- Income from operations: $2.79 billion, compared with an operating loss of $143 million in Q2.
- Net income: $4.40 billion, or 35 cents per diluted share, versus a net loss of $1.05 billion in Q3 2025.
- Adjusted EBITDA: $8.81 billion, up 306% year over year.
- Capital expenditures: $19.59 billion for the quarter, about $16.4 billion of it in the SI segment.
Fortune, citing Visible Alpha consensus data, says analysts had expected about $12.86 billion in revenue and $2.33 billion in operating income.
Segment by segment
Super Intelligence (SI), the segment SpaceX used to report as Artificial Intelligence, brought in $7.56 billion, up 830% year over year and nearly triple the second quarter. The company credits new cloud services agreements, its acquisition of Cursor (completed August 14, which contributed $608 million in revenue through September 30) and wider Grok adoption. SI swung to $431 million in operating income, and nameplate compute reached 1.7 GW at quarter end, up from 1.4 GW in June.
Connectivity, mostly Starlink, grew 69% to $5.25 billion, and its operating income nearly doubled to $2.37 billion. Starlink ended the quarter with 13.6 million consumer subscribers, 1.6 million more than in June, and consumer ARPU rose to $69 a month. Fortune notes the subscriber gain fell short of the roughly 2.29 million analysts had predicted.
Space revenue rose 6% to $1.77 billion across 35 launches (12 for customers). The segment was roughly break-even, with a $7 million operating loss, as Starship R&D spending kept climbing. SpaceX counted Starship Flight 14 on September 28, which deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, as its first revenue-generating Starship mission, and says that flight added about 10 times the downlink capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch.
Other notes from the release
- SpaceX ended September with $51.3 billion in cash and equivalents plus $38.6 billion in marketable securities.
- After the quarter closed, it agreed to buy a nationwide 800 MHz low-band spectrum portfolio for Starlink Mobile. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.
- It announced plans for a Starship spaceport in Louisiana, with a first launch targeted for 2029.
The earnings call also produced two other headlines: Elon Musk said special committees at SpaceX and Tesla are exploring a merger, and SpaceX said Starship Flight 15 will try to catch both stages.
Sources: SpaceX Q3 2026 earnings release (SEC filing), Fortune.