SpaceX First Report Card | AskMelon Articles
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On Tuesday evening, the fourth of August, less than eight weeks after the record listing, SpaceX posted its first quarterly report as a public company. The release hit shortly after the four o'clock close and was digested by the after-hours tape into Tuesday night. The numbers arrived in the format the bulls asked for and the bears feared. Revenue beat by roughly a billion dollars. Losses narrowed to less than half of what most analysts had modeled. Starlink kept doubling. Artificial-intelligence-segment revenue more than tripled. Forward guidance escalated into terrain that would have been mocked, three months ago, by anyone reading the prospectus with a calculator. The stock had closed Tuesday's regular session at $125.33, up more than nine percent on the day, then reversed sharply in after-hours trading as the release landed, printing lows near $114 that put it, once again, close to half of what it was worth on the fourth day of its life.
What the report actually said, read alongside the calendar, is that the carousel did not slow. It accelerated. Capital expenditure in the quarter came in at eighteen billion four hundred million dollars, more than the entire 2025 full-year figure, and more than double the first-quarter run rate on which the offering was priced. That figure is the machine's operating fingerprint. And on Thursday morning at the opening bell, the second full trading day after Tuesday's release, nearly nine hundred and eleven million shares held by insiders, twenty percent of the eligible locked-up stock, become saleable for the first time. The chief executive's own stake stays fenced until June 2027. Everyone else's does not.
What came true
Before the forensic move, the concessions. The bull case here has never been fantasy; the argument was always about the price. In the eight weeks since the debut, the bull case landed several of its promised deliverables.
Starlink is exactly what the bulls said it was. The Connectivity segment posted $4.3 billion of revenue in the quarter, up sixty-six percent year-over-year, on twelve million subscribers, a base that had doubled in twelve months. Average revenue per user held at sixty-six dollars a month, an unusually stable figure for a category that was, three years ago, still an experiment. The segment posted seventy-nine percent operating-income growth. In the ninety days that closed the quarter, another 1.7 million net additions arrived. That is a real utility, in real countries, serving real customers who pay every month. Nothing in the prior view disputed that, and nothing in the August print undermines it.
The launch monopoly is also, in most respects, what the bulls said. On the twenty-fourth of July, forty-two days after the listing, SpaceX put a Super Heavy-Starship v3 stack on the pad at Starbase for its thirteenth integrated test flight, the first since the offering. The booster separated cleanly. Its descent, less cleanly: only ten of thirteen Raptor engines relit for the landing burn, and only five were still running at the moment of a hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The upper stage, the piece that has broken up on prior flights, the piece that is the whole game for Mars and for the NASA Artemis lunar lander contract, flew its sub-orbital trajectory as designed, deployed its payload, and made a rocket-powered splashdown northwest of Australia, roughly an hour and five minutes after launch, remaining fully intact on the water. On the same flight, the company deployed twenty of its new Starlink V3 satellites, the payload the whole Starship program was engineered to justify. Six of those satellites carried cameras and turned back to inspect the vehicle they had ridden, the first real-world imagery of an intact heat shield on a returning upper stage. The chief executive, on his own platform, called it a step-change. The camera did not disagree. The May flight had been ugly, engines out on the booster and a near-scrub on the upper stage. The July flight, hard booster splashdown and all, was not.
Concede those two facts up front, because they are the strongest part of the bull case and they are load-bearing. The rockets flew. The utility scaled. If either premise had failed on July twenty-fourth or on August fourth, this would be a shorter and much simpler article, and it would be filed in a different section.
Now the parts that did not go forward.
The burn
The alarm bell the IPO prospectus rang loudest was capital expenditure. It disclosed $12.7 billion...