SpaceX Posts $4.4 Billion Profit on $14.6 Billion Revenue as Starship Readies for Florida Pads

SpaceX reported a third-quarter profit of $4.4 billion on revenue of $14.6 billion on Oct. 20, its second quarterly report since the company began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX in June. Revenue rose 161% from $5.6 billion a year earlier, and the company swung from a net loss of about $1.1 billion in the same quarter of 2025. For Florida, the results are a measure of the company that flies most of the rockets leaving Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center, and that is spending heavily to bring its giant Starship rocket to the Space Coast.

The quarter also brought the first orbital flight of Starship, which the company said carried 26 of its next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, and a promise from Elon Musk that the next test flight will try to catch both stages of the rocket with the launch tower.

The numbers

SpaceX's earnings release, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, puts revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30 at $14.575 billion. Income from operations was $2.8 billion, and adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure the company uses, was $8.8 billion, up 306% from a year earlier. Diluted earnings came to 35 cents a share.

Net income of $4.4 billion ran well ahead of operating income because of items below the operating line. The filing shows $873 million of interest income, about $1 billion of other income and a $390 million income tax benefit, partly offset by $675 million of interest expense. The company held $51.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of September, up from $24.7 billion at the end of 2025, after raising money in its June initial public offering.

Analysts had expected revenue of roughly $12.7 billion, according to Yahoo Finance's coverage of the report, and the stock rose in after-hours trading.

The key figures from the release, compared with the prior quarter and the same quarter a year earlier:

Where the money came from

The biggest driver was not rockets. SpaceX's Super Intelligence segment, the artificial intelligence business built around the Grok models and the company's data center computing capacity, brought in $7.56 billion, about 52% of total revenue and up 830% from a year earlier. The company said the jump came from new cloud services agreements, its acquisition of the coding software company Cursor, which closed Aug. 14 and contributed $608 million of revenue through September, and wider use of Grok. That segment earned $431 million from operations after $1.2 billion in stock compensation tied to the Cursor deal.

The Connectivity segment, which is mostly Starlink, remained the steadiest earner. It produced $5.2 billion in revenue, up 69%, and $2.4 billion in operating income, the large majority of the company's total. Starlink ended September with 13.6 million consumer subscribers, up 1.6 million in three months, and average monthly revenue per consumer subscriber rose 5% to $69. The company said more than 3,800 aircraft were equipped with Starlink, and that after the quarter it agreed to buy 800 MHz spectrum licenses for its Starlink Mobile service, a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027.

The launch business that Florida depends on

The Space segment, which covers Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, Dragon missions and Starship, had revenue of $1.77 billion, up 6% from a year earlier and 84% from the second quarter. It still lost $7 million from operations, compared with a $259 million operating profit a year earlier, as research and development spending in the segment climbed to $1.2 billion from $849 million. The release attributes the higher costs to accelerated investment in Starship.

SpaceX flew 35 missions in the quarter, 12 for customers and 23 for itself, mostly Starlink deployments. That was down from 44 launches in the third quarter of 2025, and the nine-month total of 113 trailed last year's 128. A large share of those flights lift off from the company's two Florida pads, Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, so the pace of the launch business shows up directly in Brevard County. The company's latest Florida mission, the Bandwagon-5 rideshare, lifted off from SLC-40 on the morning of Oct. 20, hours before the report.

Among the quarter's customer launches was NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which flew on a Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A on Aug. 30. SpaceX also said it signed three more NASA space station crew missions, 18 National Security Space Launch missions and a contract to deliver a payload to the lunar surface with Starship. Crew Dragon missions for NASA launch from Florida.

Starship's breakthrough, and the Florida pads

The company described Starship Flight 14 as its first orbital Starship flight and its first revenue-generating Starship mission. It said the 26 Starlink V3 satellites aboard represented roughly 10 times the downlink capacity added by a single Falcon 9 Starlink launch. President Gwynne Shotwell said on the earnings call that two of the quarter's 35 launches were Starship flights, according to Yahoo Finance's summary of the call.

Musk said Flight 15 is expected next month and will attempt to recover both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage with the launch tower. He projected that Starship could fly weekly in the first half of 2027 and twice weekly or more by the end of that year.

That cadence matters for the Space Coast because Starship is supposed to fly from Florida as well as from South Texas. SpaceX has been building a Starship pad at Launch Complex 39A, where the launch mount was lifted into place on Nov. 5, 2025, and is rebuilding Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral, which the Department of the Air Force cleared for Starship in a record of decision in November 2025. The SLC-37 plan calls for two pads designed to support up to 76 launches a year. NASASpaceFlight.com reported in September that the 39A pad was close to launch readiness while the SLC-37 tower was still being stacked.

The company is also building a Starship processing facility it calls Gigabay near Kennedy Space Center. When SpaceX and the state announced it in March 2025, they put the investment at $1.8 billion and the payoff at about 600 full-time jobs on the Space Coast by 2030, with the building targeted to be operational by the end of 2026.

The earnings release gave no date for a first Starship launch from Florida. It did announce a third Starship site: a spaceport the company calls Starbase, Louisiana, designed to support thousands of Starship flights a year, with a first launch targeted for 2029. Musk said on the call that the internal goal is 2028.

What it means for Florida

Three things in the report bear on the Space Coast. First, SpaceX's total launch count is running below last year's, even as the company prepares Starship to take over Starlink deployments that now fill most Falcon 9 manifests. Second, Starship spending is rising: Space segment capital spending reached $1.6 billion in the quarter, and the company said its capital budget is going mainly to AI computing, Starship infrastructure and satellite production. Third, the company now has more sites competing for Starship flights, with Texas operating, Florida under construction and Louisiana planned.

For Brevard County, a Starship debut at 39A would mean the largest rocket ever flown launching from the same pad that sent Apollo crews to the Moon, plus the jobs and supplier work tied to Gigabay.

What's next

SpaceX projected fourth-quarter capital spending of $35 billion to $40 billion as more computing capacity comes online. Starship Flight 15, with the attempted double catch, is expected in November. In Florida, the next milestones to watch are the first Starship vehicles arriving at Launch Complex 39A for stacking and the company's first launch date announcement for the East Coast. SpaceX's next quarterly report, covering the fourth quarter and full year 2026, is expected early next year.