SpaceX Reports First Post-IPO Earnings — and Announces Plans to Upend Telecom

SpaceX delivered its first earnings report as a public company, beating revenue estimates — though shares fell in after-hours trading as investors braced for a lockup expiration later in the week. Lockup expirations are standard post-IPO mechanics: insiders and early investors who were prohibited from selling during the lockup period become free to do so simultaneously, creating selling pressure regardless of underlying performance. Adding to the intrigue, an unidentified buyer placed a $20 million options bet that SpaceX shares could roughly triple in value by Friday — an extraordinarily aggressive position that is either informed speculation or a near-certain loss of premium.

The most technically ambitious item on SpaceX's near-term calendar is a planned Starship upper-stage tower catch this month. The company has demonstrated multiple catches of the Super Heavy first-stage booster in its launch tower's mechanical arms, but catching the upper stage — which travels at substantially higher velocity with narrower margins — is a different engineering challenge. Satellite imagery showing a Starship upper stage being towed through the Indian Ocean by tugboats offered a concrete illustration of the scale of hardware involved in previous test recovery operations.

SpaceX also announced plans to compete directly with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile using Starlink connectivity — a statement the telecom industry may be tempted to dismiss but arguably should not. Starlink's low-Earth-orbit constellation, now numbering several thousand satellites, is increasingly capable of providing broadband competitive with terrestrial networks in urban areas, not just rural ones. If the service delivers reliable low-latency performance in major metropolitan markets, the traditional argument that satellite cannot replace fiber weakens significantly.

A partnership with NVIDIA for orbital AI data centers adds a further dimension. The concept — hosting compute capacity on satellites to serve AI inference workloads with lower latency to certain geographies — carries genuine uncertainty around economics: launch costs, in-orbit power constraints, thermal management, and maintenance are all non-trivial challenges. But NVIDIA's involvement suggests at least one major chip manufacturer considers the technical path credible enough to commit resources. SpaceX's job postings for AI data center work 'on and off Earth' — the company's own phrasing — signal that capital is being allocated to this direction in real terms. Separately, NASA confirmed it is deploying Cybertrucks as astronaut escape vehicles for the Crew-13 launch, a choice that has an operational logic: the role requires speed, torque, reliable performance near a potentially failing rocket, and sufficient capacity for crew and equipment.