The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting started.
SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity division posted $1.7 billion in operating income for the second quarter, maintaining its status as the company’s only profitable business, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon as part of its inaugural earnings report as a public company.
The AI division, built around the Grok model and the X social media and technology platform, lost $1.3 billion while spending $15.8 billion on capital projects. That capital spending amounted to more than three times Starlink’s quarterly revenue of $4.3 billion, which was up 66%.
Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, used the first SpaceX earnings call to argue that investors are badly underestimating Starlink. He predicted that a new generation of satellites could increase Starlink revenue tenfold, and said the network could eventually deliver “a majority of the world’s internet” in less than 10 years.
He said AI and robots will drive demand for bandwidth far beyond anything people generate on their own. “I think Starlink is the only thing that can actually service that bandwidth,” he said.
Overall, SpaceX topped Wall Street expectations with revenue of $7.8 billion for the quarter, up 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier. The company narrowed its net loss to $541 million from $1 billion.
SpaceX shares closed at $125.33, up 9.4% on the day, then fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading following the report — a sign that investors are concerned about the company’s capital spending.
SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites at a Seattle-area factory that produced about 70 a week from December 2025 to April 2026, according to the company’s IPO filing. The output has put roughly 9,600 Starlink satellites in orbit, about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites circling the planet.
Amazon is building its own satellite internet network at a factory in nearby Kirkland, Wash., but has yet to begin commercial service. Its Leo constellation has “close to 400 satellites in orbit, enough to begin initial satellite internet service this year,” CEO Andy Jassy told analysts last week.
For the second quarter, SpaceX reported 12 million Starlink subscribers, double the number a year earlier and an increase of 1.7 million from the first quarter. The revenue increase in the Starlink division (officially known as “Connectivity”) was driven by a 108% jump in enterprise and government business, which now accounts for more than 40% of the segment’s sales.
The subscriber total was just under the 12.19 million Wall Street had projected, but the segment’s revenue exceeded expectations by about $460 million, more than any other part of the company.
Starlink now brings in $66 a month per subscriber, down from $85 a year ago as it expands overseas and adds cheaper plans. The good news for SpaceX: the figure stopped falling, holding flat from the first quarter, despite the company’s warning to IPO investors that it would keep sliding.
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