If you paid attention to what SpaceX showed us on today’s Q3 earnings call, I’m pretty sure you walked away thinking the same thing I did.... I don’t own enough $SPCX. SpaceX just reported $14.6 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in net income. Then CFO Bret Johnsen guided $33–$37 billion in revenue for ONE quarter in Q1 2027. This was only its second earnings report since going public on June 12, following the Q2 loss reported on August 4. Now it has reported its first profitable quarter as a public company. And the financial results were just the beginning... Grok Bot, massive compute expansion, Starship’s next catch attempt, Starlink Mobile, Terafab, and a potential combination with Tesla were all on the call. These are my top 12 biggest takeaways from the call. 1/ THE QUARTER The Q3 results: • Revenue: $14.6B, up 161% from $5.6B a year ago • Net income: $4.4B, versus a $1.1B loss a year ago • Adjusted EBITDA: $8.8B, up 306% • Backlog: $63B as of September 30 • Expected backlog recognition within the next year: approximately $42B. • Deferred revenue included in that backlog: $17.5B. Bret said, “Approximately $42 billion of this backlog is expected to be recognized within the next year.” It signals both this quarter’s results and a substantial amount of business are already in the pipeline. 2/ THE OUTLOOK These were some of the biggest statements on the entire call, and each referred to a different period and measure. a) Bret said SpaceX remains on track for $100B in ARR by the end of this year, which he defined as December’s revenue annualized, so December revenue × 12... which my all means is super impressive. b) Then Bret guided, “…total company revenues in the range of $33 to $37 billion for Q1 of 2027.” That is revenue guidance for a single quarter. c) Then Elon said the unthinkable, “…annual recurring revenue by the end of ’27 is somewhere between $500 billion and a $ trillion.” He laughed and said he did not want to give Bret a heart attack... I think the growth in SpaceX revenue is about to go exponential. 3/ SUPER INTELLIGENCE IS NOW MORE THAN HALF OF REVENUE This was the quarter the scale of the SI business became impossible to miss. • SI revenue: $7.6B, up $5B from Q2 and $6.7B from a year ago. • SI adjusted EBITDA: $5B, up $3.8B from Q2. • Reported SI operating income: $431M. • Operating income excluding $1.2B of Cursor acquisition-related stock compensation is approximately $1.6B, according to Bret. SI Solutions and Infrastructure generated $7B in revenue, including $608M from Cursor, which closed around the middle of the quarter. Even excluding Cursor, that revenue line grew 192% sequentially. The economics of new compute deployments stood out, too... Bret said pricing is tracking slightly above the high end of the previously discussed $30–$50 per watt range. Bret: “At current pricing, new compute deployments are generating a payback of less than a year.” Elon described demand from every hyperscaler and dozens of smaller companies: “We could rent out our compute several times over if we said yes to everyone.” 4/ GROK BOT HAS 800,000 PAID WEEKLY USERS Grok Bot launched in August. By earlier this month, it had already reached 800,000 paid weekly users, more than doubling over the previous month. Gwynne Shotwell: “Grok Bot, our agentic assistant, launched in August, and we already had paid weekly users of 800,000 earlier this month, more than doubling over the last month.” B2B is the fastest-growing part of the business, with companies using it across sales, marketing, IT, and engineering. Elon also said “…we’re seeing the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life.” and also mentioned that usage per person is increasing over time as they see people keep finding more uses for it as the product improves. Early enterprise deployment is already underway with trusted customers, and Elon expects broad enterprise deployment within a few weeks, with Grok Bot working inside teams like a virtual coworker. I keep saying Grok Bot is the hottest product in the world right now... this is why. 5/ COMPUTE IS GOING FROM 1.7 GW TO AN EXPECTED ~13 GW Here is the capacity timeline: • End of Q3: 1.7 GW of nameplate compute • End of October target: nearly 2.2 GW • End of 2026 target: 2.5–3 GW • During 2027: Elon expects an additional 10 GW • End of 2027: around 13 GW total, including this year’s capacity Elon: “I’m fairly confident of being able to bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027.” Separately, SpaceX is aiming to add 20 GW of POWER AND COOLING INFRASTRUCTURE during 2027, so the facilities are ready ahead of the chips. FYI, that is a different target from deployed compute. Elon also described a small, nonzero chance of exceeding 20 GW of actual SI compute next year. He presented that as an upside possibility. On hardware, the prepared remarks called for roughly 200,000 GB300s coming online per month through year-end. In the Q&A, Elon put the current pace at 220,000 per month, with further acceleration next year and most of next year’s deployments using Vera Rubin. For training, the aim is a cluster of 440,000 Vera Rubin computers by the end of Q2 2027, intended to push Grok toward the front. 6/ THE TERAFAB TIMELINE SpaceX is working toward producing its own chips one day. The internal aim is a functional first test chip around May or June 2027 at the research fab in Austin. Elon described this as a line test. For volume production, “…our aspiration is to reach volume production around Q3 of ’28 at Terafab at Gibbons Creek…” He explicitly called the dates “very aggressive,” while saying Q3 or Q4 2028 is within the range of possible outcomes. The eventual ambition is enormous, which is production of a terawatt of superintelligence chips per year. That's freakin nuts. 7/ STARSHIP FLIGHT 15 ATTEMPTING BOTH CATCHES Flight 15 is expected in November, and SpaceX plans to attempt a tower catch of both the booster and the ship. Elon said, “For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we’re going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship.” He said success would mark the first full recovery of an orbital launch vehicle and considers success more likely than not, while making the qualification clear that “Success is not guaranteed on these first flights…” Gwynne said SpaceX expects the FAA license for Flight 15 to include return to the launch site and tower catches for both stages. The next milestones are: • An on-orbit refueling attempt in early 2027. • Weekly Starship flights at some point in the first half of 2027. • Twice-weekly flights, potentially more, by the end of 2027. Flight 14 already demonstrated the capacity opportunity, “Flight 14 deployed 26 terabits per second of Starlink bandwidth. That’s equivalent to 10 Falcon 9 launches.” Elon also said the ship was only about half loaded. 8/ THE LAUNCH BUSINESS, LOUISIANA, AND THE MOON SpaceX reported 35 launches during the quarter, including: • 21 Starlink missions on Falcon 9 • Two Starship flights • One Falcon Heavy carrying NASA’s Roman Space Telescope • Other customer missions, including six national security launches New business included three additional Dragon crew missions through 2028, 18 national security launches, and three Starfall missions on Starship. On the Moon, Gwynne highlighted the Starlink communications contract for NASA’s Artemis III mission and a contract to deliver payload to the lunar surface using Starship. Then there is Louisiana. Elon said the site could eventually have 20 or more launch towers. The internal aspiration is a first launch in 2028... he called 2029 highly likely and said he expects launches at scale from Louisiana in 2029. 9/ STARLINK HAS 13.6M CONSUMER SUBSCRIBERS Connectivity delivered another major quarter: • Revenue: $5.2B, up 69% year over year and 22% sequentially • Gross margin: 55% • Consumer subscribers: 13.6M • Consumer subscribers added in Q3: 1.6M • Monthly ARPU: $69, up 5% sequentially • Markets served: 174, with Vietnam and Uganda added during the quarter And the 13.6M subscriber figure is consumers.... Gwynne said enterprise and aviation are additional to that count. Aviation continues to expand, “Starlink is now contracted for roughly 12,000 planes, almost a quarter of the available aircraft.” SpaceX has agreements with three of the four major U.S. carriers. Aviation production has quadrupled since the beginning of the year, and management expects it to double again before year-end. 10/ STARLINK MOBILE AND THE NEXT CONSTELLATION Starlink Mobile surpassed 22M monthly users, up 37% from Q2. Gwynne said the FCC approved 15,000 Mobile V2 satellites a few weeks ago. SpaceX also agreed to acquire a portfolio of low-band spectrum. The plan is to integrate those spectrum purchases and turn on service in early 2028, which Gwynne described as the path toward Starlink Mobile becoming a major U.S. carrier. Elon also laid out the broader constellation ambition, “…probably within three years… we will have about 100 times the bandwidth of the current Starlink constellation.” He described a constellation on the order of 100,000 satellites, with each satellite carrying more than 10 times the bandwidth of the current ones. Flight 14’s V3 satellites are the beginning of that transition... through 2027, the target is to ramp each Starship launch of V3 broadband satellites toward more than 20 times the downlink capacity of a current Falcon 9 Starlink launch. On the revenue opportunity for this, Elon said, “We do see a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue.” 11/ THE INVESTMENT BILL IS GOING UP TO $40B NEXT QUARTER The buildout requires enormous capital spending. • Q3 capex: $19.6B • Q4 capex guidance: $35–$40B Bret said SpaceX has investment-grade status, a strong balance sheet, and access to multiple pools of debt capital to help fund the expansion. He also gave an important margin qualification saying, “…total company gross margins in Q4 to be more consistent with the second quarter…” Q3 benefited from some one-time items and a favorable customer mix and management is telling us investors to account for that when looking at the next quarter. 12/ SPACEX + TESLA MERGER Elon confirmed that both companies have formed special committees to discuss a potential combination at shareholders’ request. The committees consist of independent directors. Elon said he is a conflicted party and is not participating in those discussions. No terms have been agreed, and there is no guarantee an agreement will be reached. His personal view was clear thought, “Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes.” He sees value in combining the companies across software, chip design, Terafab, robotics, and mass to orbit. But he also said treating a combination as certain would be overstating it. On the voting hurdle, Elon mentioned, “…on the Tesla side, we will need a 50% vote of all shares, not just those who vote, but of all shareholders.” As he described it, approval would require yes votes representing 50% of all outstanding Tesla shares. That makes participation a major hurdle. Formal discussions are underway for these two companies to become one. What an incredible earnings call. Huge shoutout to Elon and the entire SpaceX team for the years of hard work behind everything we saw today. To the engineers, the factory teams, and everyone working to get these rockets, satellites, and products out into the world... thank you for making this happen. I’m proud to be a long-term shareholder, grateful to the people building this company, and SO excited for what comes next. You guys are giving us a future worth looking forward to. Congratulations on an amazing Q3 2026! 👏