SpaceX leadership—including Elon Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, and Bret Johnsen—hosted the company's Q2 FY2026 earnings call to discuss what has been a transformative quarter.
With major breakthroughs in Starship reusability, explosive Starlink growth, and an unprecedented scale-up in AI compute, here are all of the core highlights that you don't want to miss:
1⃣ STARLINK & CONNECTIVITY
🛰️ Starlink experienced its best quarter ever for consumer growth, adding a record number of subscribers while keeping the average revenue per user stable.
"During the second quarter, we added net more than 1.7 million Starlink subscribers globally, consumer. This reflects our best quarter of new customers to date... We achieved this by holding ARPU, which is the average revenue per user, stable at $66 per month..."
💼 The enterprise and government segments are becoming massive revenue drivers, highlighted by a major multi-billion dollar win with the U.S. Space Force and rapid expansion in aviation.
"On the government side, we won more than $6 billion in U.S. contracts in Q2, supporting major Space Force programs that offer our nation mission-critical communications and sensing capabilities..."
🌊 Starlink's enterprise expansion has massive untapped potential, particularly in the maritime and aviation sectors where market penetration remains extremely low.
"...we remain, for example, less than 10% penetrated in one of the largest segments being aviation. ... Maritime, I think, Starlink opens up the TAM dramatically. Starlink offers the capability that ships that don't really have much connectivity right now because they can't afford VSATs. We can basically outfit those ships with Starlink Maritime."
📡 The upcoming launch of Starlink V3 satellites will provide an unprecedented leap in global internet bandwidth capacity and capability.
"We expect to launch about an order of magnitude more Starlink V3 satellites. That would mean a roughly two order of magnitude increase in the delivered bandwidth."
🔗 Starlink V3's inter-satellite laser communications were successfully proven during a recent test, clearing the way for operational deployment.
"Following a successful speed run test of the V3 Starlink satellites on the most recent Starship launch, during which we connected every satellite through every laser link, we intend to deploy V3 satellites into the constellation for operational use on the upcoming Starship missions."
📱 Starlink Mobile plans to disrupt the cellular industry by combining 65 MHz of EchoStar spectrum with highly efficient, dish-based terrestrial network infrastructure.
"Instead of having to deploy these very expensive and difficult-to-locate large cellular base stations, we feel reasonably confident that we can deploy a large number of sort of small stations essentially. They're really just Starlink dishes that also provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands..."
🏭 SpaceX's terrestrial mobile network will bypass traditional expensive cell towers by utilizing widespread, small-scale cellular base stations mounted on standard Starlink hardware.
"Instead of having to deploy these very expensive and difficult-to-locate large cellular base stations, we feel reasonably confident that we can deploy a large number of sort of small stations essentially. They're really just Starlink dishes that also provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands and have them be all over the place."
2⃣ AI, COMPUTE & SOFTWARE
🏗️ SpaceX is rapidly building massive AI computing data centers powered exclusively by Nvidia hardware, leveraging its rocket engineering efficiency to deploy infrastructure faster than competitors.
"Going forward, we've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. ... We expect to end this year with over two gigawatts of compute."
⚡ SpaceX is prioritizing massive power and cooling infrastructure build-outs for its data centers, targeting up to 20 GW of power capacity by 2027 to stay ahead of GPU supply.
"Our tentative target is to actually have 20 GW at the power and cooling level online by the end of next year. ... Our goal is to have far more power cooling and electrical equipment than we have GPUs. That's the logical thing to do, given the relative expense of GPUs versus balance of system."
🖥️ The vast majority of SpaceX's rapidly expanding AI compute capacity will be leased to third parties rather than used internally.
"We do expect the percentage of compute that we use internally for Grok training to decrease over time and to have far more of the compute used for inference, or for renting training and inference compute to others. I would expect maybe 10% of our compute to be used for Grok training, something like that."
🤖 SpaceX is maintaining a rapid, near-term release cadence for its AI models, with incremental updates planned for the coming weeks.
"We have Grok 4.6 coming out probably next week and then Grok 4.7 is about three or four weeks from today. We expect the cadence of AI development to improve dramatically."
🧠 The upcoming Grok 5 AI model will uniquely leverage SpaceX's extensive historical engineering data for its training corpus to create an advanced engineering assistant.
"With Grok 5, which should be out before the end of this year, we will be incorporating the entire corpus of SpaceX data. Basically, all the data that SpaceX has ever produced... will be incorporated into Grok training."
🌌 The company is developing space-based AI computing infrastructure called the Starmind AI satellite, designed for both orbital and ground use, with launches beginning next year.
"With respect to the Starmind AI satellite, which will be essentially an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 computer. ... We expect to start launching this next year. ... We expect to actually deploy this on the ground as well as in orbit, because we think it's going to be a radical simplification of the normal NVL72 rack."
🤝 SpaceX is finalizing its acquisition of Cursor to merge engineering efforts and leverage a combined sales approach for its AI segment.
"We're looking forward to welcoming the Cursor team to SpaceX to integrate our engineering and begin to benefit from a combined sales capability. ... I think we're through almost all of the regulatory hurdles."
📢 The AI segment overhauled its advertising technology platform to incorporate artificial intelligence and improve the customer experience.
"Advertising revenue grew 7% sequentially as we overhauled our advertising platform technology to enable AI functionality and enhance self-service for all customer types."
3⃣ STARSHIP, LAUNCH OPERATIONS & INFRASTRUCTURE
🚀 The development of Starship is advancing successfully, with the critical heat shield issue reportedly solved and plans to rapidly increase flight cadence.
"All indications from data and our visual inspection suggest that we have solved the heat shield problem, which is arguably the single biggest problem. ... I would say that we do not see any technical obstacles at this point to achieving full and rapid reusability."
📉 Starship is specifically designed to slash launch costs by an order of magnitude compared to current industry-leading vehicles.
"Starship aims to quadruple payload capacity and reduce launch costs by 10x compared to our Falcon 9 rocket, unlocking significant capabilities across all of our business segments."
🗼 The company has set a near-term roadmap to catch both the Starship booster and the ship using the launch tower this year.
"We will try to actually catch the first and the second stage of Starlink V3 this year, we could possibly catch the ship as soon as the next flight... assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month."
🏗️ To support a massively increased launch cadence, the company is aggressively expanding its physical production and launch infrastructure across multiple states.
"We continue to make progress building the infrastructure required to support thousands of Starships launches per year, including accelerating Raptor and launch vehicle production, the build-out of our Gigabay, and making significant progress towards activating multiple launch pads at Starbase and in Cape Canaveral at Pad 39A and Pad 37."
🚀 In the meantime, the current Falcon fleet continues to dominate global spaceflight, lifting the vast majority of all Earth mass to orbit to support ongoing operations.
"...we remain the leading launch provider globally, with 78 total launches and 1,041 tons of mass to orbit delivered in the first half of this year... We deliver 80%-90% of total Earth mass to orbit per year with Falcon."
4⃣ LUNAR MISSIONS & DEEP SPACE EXPLORATION
🌕 The company is progressing steadily toward its Artemis commitments and has set a clear timeline for returning humans to the lunar surface.
"Artemis III mission is next year. That's where we will dock with the Orion spacecraft. We will follow that up with a direct to lunar cargo mission, uncrewed. We want to put boots on the ground, boots on the moon in 2028."
⛽ Demonstrating in-orbit propellant transfer is the next critical technical milestone required to enable both deeper space missions and lunar landings.
"As far as the milestones go, propellant transfer in orbit is critical to both our internal SpaceX as well as our HLS ambitions."
🛸 Long-term product roadmaps include lunar robotics and manufacturing to support deep-space infrastructure and civilization-scale expansion.
"...using robots on the Moon to scale up manufacturing on the Moon, which I know it sounds like super sci-fi right now, but it's going to happen, will enable us to build the mass accelerator on the Moon. ... you can probably scale to 1,000x the economy of Earth in terms of intelligence launched to space."
5⃣ FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE & REVENUE TARGETS
📈 SpaceX reported exceptional Q2 2026 financial results with revenue nearly doubling and adjusted EBITDA growing significantly.
"Revenues of $7.8 billion, up 92% from $4.1 billion, a quarterly net loss of $541 million, an improvement of $467 million, an adjusted EBITDA of $3.5 billion, up 191% from $1.2 billion."
💸 Driven by rapid growth across all three major segments, the company expects to reach $100 billion in annualized revenue run rate this year and has accelerated its $1 trillion total revenue target.
"We believe this puts us on a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate, by the end of this year... Prior to the IPO, the financial projections we had were reaching $1 trillion in revenue in 2031. We now expect that to be in 2030."
x.com/i/broadcasts/1XxyggqBZ…