SpaceX Posts First Profit Since Its IPO as Q3 Revenue Jumps 161% to $14.58 Billion

Two reports into life as a public company, SpaceX has done the thing its first one did not: it made money — a lot of it, and mostly not from rockets.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: SPCX) said on Tuesday that total revenue rose 161% year-over-year to $14.58 billion in the third quarter ended September 30, 2026, up from $5.58 billion a year earlier and $7.81 billion in the second quarter. Net income was $4.4 billion, a swing from a net loss a year earlier, with diluted earnings per share of $0.35 and basic earnings per share of $0.37. Income from operations was $2.79 billion and Adjusted EBITDA was $8.81 billion, up 306% from $2.17 billion a year earlier. The print cleared Wall Street's bar by a wide margin: revenue of $14.58 billion compared with analysts' estimate of $12.72 billion in the LSEG-compiled consensus Reuters cited, and a $4.4 billion profit against the $1.57 billion analysts had expected. The stock rose after the release, sending its shares up about 3% in extended trading. It is SpaceX's first profitable quarter since its June IPO and only its second earnings report as a public company — a sharp swing from the second quarter, when the company posted a net loss of $541 million on revenue of $7.81 billion, per Reuters.

Super Intelligence is now the biggest business

The engine was not launch. Super Intelligence (SI) revenue was $7.56 billion in the quarter, up 830% year-over-year from $813 million and up 195% sequentially. Inside the segment, solutions and infrastructure revenue was $7.02 billion, against $359 million a year earlier, while advertising revenue was $538 million. SI income from operations was $431 million, inclusive of $1.2 billion in share-based compensation from the Cursor acquisition, and SI Adjusted EBITDA was $4.95 billion. Nameplate compute reached 1.7 GW as of September 30, 2026, up from 1.4 GW at June 30 and 0.6 GW a year earlier, as the company continued the buildout of COLOSSUS II, signed additional cloud services agreements and introduced Grok Bot, its always-on agentic SI system. Reuters' read of the economics: the AI money comes mainly from renting data-center capacity to developers such as Anthropic, Alphabet's Google and Reflection AI under compute contracts — closer to a cloud provider's business than to an AI lab selling its own models.

Cursor closed in August, and it was not cheap

SpaceX completed its acquisition of Cursor on August 14, 2026, at an implied equity value of $60 billion. The GAAP purchase consideration was $42.5 billion, and the value of equity awards issued in connection with the acquisition attributable to post-acquisition service is $23.4 billion. From the closing date through September 30, Cursor contributed $608 million of revenue to the company's consolidated results, and share-based compensation related to acquisitions in the SI segment was $1.22 billion in the quarter. That accounting is why SI can post $4.95 billion of Adjusted EBITDA and only $431 million of operating income in the same quarter: the gap is largely the cost of buying and keeping Cursor's people.

Starlink remains the profit engine

Connectivity revenue was $5.25 billion, up 69% year-over-year, and the segment remains where the dependable profit is. Connectivity income from operations was $2.37 billion, up 99% year-over-year, and Connectivity Adjusted EBITDA was $3.5 billion. Starlink consumer subscribers reached 13.6 million at period end, up from 12.0 million in the second quarter and 7.2 million a year earlier — above the 12.19 million subscribers analysts had expected, according to Reuters. Consumer revenue was $3.12 billion and enterprise and government revenue was $2.13 billion. The trade-off is price: Starlink consumer ARPU was $69 per month, up 5% sequentially from $66 but down from $83 a year earlier, as growth spreads into lower-priced markets and plans.

Space itself was essentially breakeven

The original business was the quiet one. Space revenue was $1.77 billion, with an operating loss of $7 million — essentially breakeven — and Space Adjusted EBITDA of $357 million. SpaceX completed 35 total launches in the quarter, 12 customer launches and 23 internal launches. The milestone was Starship: the company completed its first revenue-generating Starship mission, delivering 26 Starlink V3 satellites to the constellation, representing approximately 10x the downlink capacity added by a Falcon 9 Starlink launch.

The spending still outruns the sales

For all the profit, the cash machine runs in both directions. Total capex was $19.59 billion in the third quarter — more than the quarter's entire revenue — of which SI capex was $16.44 billion; nine-month capex was $48.07 billion. Against that, SpaceX ended September 30 with cash and cash equivalents of $51.29 billion and marketable securities of $38.56 billion, and nine-month operating cash flow was $13.1 billion. The honest caveat sits in the nine-month column: despite the third-quarter profit, the nine-month net result is still a loss of $413 million, because the first half's losses have not been erased by one strong quarter.

No guidance, and a spectrum deal still pending

What remains unknown starts with the outlook. The release carries no numeric forward guidance; SpaceX said it would discuss its business outlook on its October 20 webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, and no guidance figure is stated in the release itself. Separately, on October 8, 2026, SpaceX entered into an agreement to acquire Grain's nationwide 800 MHz spectrum licenses — up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum — for Starlink Mobile; the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory and other customary closing conditions, and the release does not disclose a price. What to watch is whether SI revenue can hold anywhere near this quarter's step-change without capex staying above total revenue, whether Starlink's ARPU stabilizes as subscribers compound, and whether a second consecutive profitable quarter turns a striking debut profit into a pattern.