SpaceX beat revenue forecasts in its first public quarter, then fell 13.6 per cent on capital spending

SpaceX listed on 12 June 2026 at $135 a share, having sought a Nasdaq listing under the ticker SPCX, in what was reported as the largest initial public offering on record, and the stock climbed to $225 within days of its debut. On 4 August 2026 the company published its first quarterly figures as a public company, and the numbers beat expectations. Two days of trading then took 13.6 per cent off the price.

Revenue for the quarter was $7.8 billion, up more than 90 per cent year on year, against forecasts of $6.9 billion from LSEG and $6.8 billion from Bloomberg. The net loss was $541 million, or 9 cents a share, against Wall Street expectations of more than $1 billion in losses. The company reported a cash position of about $100 billion, $6 billion of new United States government contracts for its Starshield business, and two successful Starship V3 launches in the preceding 90 days. Al Jazeera reported the shares rose 9.4 per cent during the session and then fell 7.2 per cent after hours.

The following day, 5 August 2026, the stock closed at $108.10, down from $125.33. The trigger was not the loss but the spending. Capital expenditure for the quarter was $18.37 billion, a sixfold increase on the prior year and well above the $13.2 billion analysts had modelled. Of that, $15.8 billion went to artificial intelligence infrastructure, covering compute, storage, networking and software. The company said it was lifting data centre capacity to 2 gigawatts by the end of the year, from 1.4 gigawatts, and had booked $14.1 billion of cloud services agreements.

The internal split is the part worth reading closely. The connectivity business carried the quarter. Starlink subscribers doubled year on year to 12 million, Starlink revenue rose 66 per cent, and the unit posted operating income of $1.66 billion. The artificial intelligence division posted an operating loss of $1.2 billion in the same period, having rolled out an upgraded Grok model and, the company said, partnered with Nvidia to use its chips in Starmind AI1 orbital compute satellites. On those figures, the orbital data centre thesis that carried the listing is currently being funded out of satellite broadband subscriptions.

Analysts quoted by Al Jazeera framed it as a pattern rather than a surprise. Josh Gilbert, lead analyst at eToro, said the same scrutiny had landed on Big Tech this earnings season, with investors questioning open ended wallets and demanding a visible return on them, and that SpaceX faced that test with an added degree of difficulty because it was asking shareholders to bankroll data centres in orbit. Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, said the stock was likely to be volatile once a lock up covering about 911.5 million restricted shares, roughly 20 per cent of holdings, was lifted.

The valuation history is genuinely contested in the public record, and the sources do not agree. The ABC reported in May 2026 that the filing valued the company at about $1.25 trillion after its merger with xAI, and sought $40 billion to $80 billion, which would have exceeded Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion record from 2019. Marta Khomyn of Adelaide University wrote in The Conversation on 17 April 2026 that the company was targeting a $2 trillion valuation while raising $75 billion, equal to 3.75 per cent of its equity. In her account of the pricing published on 10 June 2026, the raise was $75 billion for about 4 per cent at $135 a share, which implies roughly $1.875 trillion. Those are three different numbers for the same company inside eight weeks, and the gap between them is the market repricing an unlisted asset in real time.

Khomyn's other point is about the rules rather than the numbers. She wrote that Nasdaq removed the 10 per cent minimum free float requirement for index inclusion and cut the seasoning period from three months to 15 trading days, with the S&P 500 and FTSE Russell making comparable adjustments, and that more than $16 trillion of passive money tracks S&P indices. On her account the company's revenue in the prior year was $15 billion. Governance is concentrated: the ABC reported that Elon Musk retains about 42 per cent of the company and more than 85 per cent of the voting power through dual class shares.

The comparison points from the filing are worth keeping in view. The ABC reported a company wide loss of about $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, Starlink revenue of about $3.2 billion with $1.2 billion of operating profit in that quarter, and xAI losses of $6.4 billion across 2025. Against that, a $541 million quarterly loss is a sharp improvement, though the reporting perimeters are not obviously identical.

What is not known: whether the artificial intelligence division's losses narrow as the data centre capacity comes online, what the lock up expiry does to the price, and whether Starlink can repeat a doubling of subscribers. This masthead was not able to open the company's filing directly, because the Securities and Exchange Commission's servers refused automated requests; every figure above is as reported by the outlets listed, and the company's investor relations site is included so readers can go to the filings themselves.