SpaceX third quarter 2026 earnings explained: segments, EPS and valuation multiples

SpaceX reported its third quarter 2026 results on October 20, 2026. Revenue for the three months ended September 30 rose 86.5% from the quarter before (Dalsna Finance calculation) and the company turned a profit. This article walks through what SpaceX does, how each of its businesses performed and what the numbers say about its valuation. Every figure is sourced and dated, and every number worked out by us is labelled as a Dalsna Finance calculation. ^[1]

SpaceX in brief

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, was founded in 2002. It is best known for its reusable rockets and for Starlink, its satellite internet service. In June 2026 it completed its initial public offering, selling 638.9 million Class A shares at $135.00 each. The shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. ^[1][2]

Three businesses

SpaceX reports three segments. Space designs, builds and launches rockets, including Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship, for commercial and government customers. Connectivity is Starlink, which the company says has more than 11,100 broadband and mobile satellites in low Earth orbit serving customers in 174 countries, territories and other markets. Super Intelligence, or SI, is the newest segment, and the IPO prospectus called it the AI segment. It covers SI infrastructure for business customers, the Grok language model and the Grok Bot agent, the software engineering platform Cursor and the social platform X. ^[2][1][3]

SpaceX said SI's growth came mainly from three things: new cloud services agreements going live, the acquisition of Cursor and wider adoption of Grok. SpaceX completed its purchase of Cursor in August 2026. The company put the purchase consideration at $42.5 billion and said Cursor added $608 million of revenue in the third quarter after the deal closed. ^[2][1]

Inside Connectivity, Starlink added 1.6 million consumer subscribers in the quarter to reach 13.6 million. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said on the call that average monthly revenue per consumer rose 5% from the second quarter to $69. In SI, operating income of $431 million came after $1,217 million of share based pay related to acquisitions, mainly Cursor, as reported in the third quarter release. ^[1][4][5]

The numbers, quarter over quarter

Revenue was $14,575 million in the third quarter, up from $7,814 million in the second, a rise of 86.5% (Dalsna Finance calculation). Operating income, which is revenue minus the costs of running the business, swung to $2,791 million from a loss of $143 million. Net income under GAAP, the standard US accounting rules, was $4,404 million against a loss of $541 million. ^[1][6]

Profit margin is net income as a share of revenue. It was 30.2% in the third quarter, against a loss equal to 6.9% of revenue in the second (Dalsna Finance calculation: $4,404 million divided by $14,575 million, and a loss of $541 million divided by $7,814 million). The operating margin, which is operating income divided by revenue, was 19.1% against a loss equal to 1.8% of revenue. ^[1][6]

Net income came in well above operating income because of items below the operating line. SpaceX booked $1,025 million of other income in the quarter. Its quarterly report says other income rose $885 million from the same quarter of 2025, mainly because of unrealized gains on its investments in unconsolidated affiliates and gains on digital assets. Unrealized means the holdings rose in value but were not sold. SpaceX also recorded a $390 million income tax benefit, which included a provisional deferred tax benefit of $449 million from releasing part of a valuation allowance, an accounting reserve held against future tax savings. Interest income of $873 million, less $675 million of interest expense, added $198 million more (Dalsna Finance calculation). ^[2][1]

SpaceX also reports Adjusted EBITDA, a non GAAP measure. It starts from net income and adds back interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, share based pay and some other items. It also takes out other income. It was $8,809 million in the third quarter and $3,538 million in the second. SpaceX reports no adjusted net income and no adjusted EPS, so this article uses Adjusted EBITDA as its adjusted measure and calls it by that name. ^[1]

Earnings per share

Earnings per share, or EPS, is profit divided by the number of shares. The diluted figure also counts shares that could be created from stock options and similar awards. SpaceX reported diluted EPS of $0.35 for the third quarter and a loss of $0.09 per share for the second. Dividing net income by weighted average diluted shares gives the same figures. The weighted average share count more than doubled between the two quarters, so the third quarter is the first full quarter on the larger share base after the June IPO. ^[1][2][6]

Because SpaceX reports no adjusted EPS, the chart below shows Adjusted EBITDA per share next to EPS. It is Adjusted EBITDA divided by the 13,581,063,709 shares on the cover of the latest quarterly report, the same count for both quarters: $0.65 for the third quarter and $0.26 for the second (Dalsna Finance calculation). It is a different and larger measure than earnings, because it is counted before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and share based pay, which are real costs that come out before any profit reaches shareholders. ^[1][2]

What the market values SpaceX at

Market capitalization, or market cap, is what the stock market values the whole company at: the share price times the number of shares. SpaceX closed at $147.49 on Friday, October 23, 2026, as reported by FinanceFeeds citing StockAnalysis. The cover of its third quarter report to the SEC lists 8,246,541,218 Class A shares and 5,334,522,491 Class B shares outstanding as of October 15, 2026, a total of 13,581,063,709. Counting both classes at the Class A price gives a market cap of about $2.00 trillion (Dalsna Finance calculation: $147.49 times 13,581,063,709). Every multiple and share price below uses this one share count. ^[7][2]

Six valuation multiples

The price to earnings ratio, or P/E, is market cap divided by a year of earnings. It shows how many dollars the market is paying for each dollar of yearly profit. Annualised means one quarter multiplied by four. On that basis SpaceX has a P/E of 113.7 (Dalsna Finance calculation: $2,003.1 billion divided by $4,404 million times 4, which is $17,616 million). ^[1][7][2]

The adjusted version divides market cap by Adjusted EBITDA instead of earnings. We call it market cap to Adjusted EBITDA rather than an adjusted P/E, because Adjusted EBITDA is not earnings. On the third quarter annualised, which is $8,809 million times 4, or $35,236 million, it is 56.8 (Dalsna Finance calculation). ^[1][7][2]

A forward P/E uses an estimate of future earnings. TIKR reported on October 24, 2026 that the analyst consensus calls for normalized EPS of $2.25 for 2027. Normalized means analysts have stripped out items they treat as unusual. Multiplying $2.25 by the same 13,581,063,709 shares gives estimated earnings of about $30,557 million and a forward P/E of 65.6 (Dalsna Finance calculation on an estimate, TIKR consensus). TIKR noted that these estimates may not yet include the guidance SpaceX gave on October 20. We found no published forward estimate of Adjusted EBITDA, so there is no forward market cap to Adjusted EBITDA. ^[8][7][2]

A trailing P/E, sometimes called a historical P/E, uses the last four reported quarters, and all four are public. Added together, SpaceX lost $2,760 million over those twelve months (Dalsna Finance calculation). A P/E cannot be read from a loss, because dividing the market cap by negative earnings gives a negative number that says nothing about how expensive the shares are, so the trailing P/E is not meaningful. Trailing Adjusted EBITDA was $14,945 million, which gives a trailing market cap to Adjusted EBITDA of 134.0 (Dalsna Finance calculation). ^{[3][1][6][7][2]}

The last four quarters

SpaceX does not report the fourth quarter of 2025 on its own. It is worked out by subtracting the first nine months of 2025, from the third quarter release, from the full year 2025 in the IPO prospectus (Dalsna Finance calculation). ^[3][1]

Two base cases: the third quarter held flat for a year

Suppose revenue stayed at the third quarter's level for a full year, with no growth and no decline: $14,575 million times 4, or $58,300 million. The first base case keeps the reported 30.2% net margin, which gives earnings of $17,616 million, or $1.30 per share on the cover share count. This case is simply the latest quarter annualised, so at the annualised P/E it returns the October 23, 2026 close of $147.49 by construction. The same is true of the Adjusted EBITDA row at the annualised market cap to Adjusted EBITDA. The other cells only show how the price moves when the same earnings are given a different multiple. ^[1][7][2]

The third quarter's net income was lifted by items that may not repeat. One is the $1,025 million of other income, much of it unrealized gains. The other is the $390 million tax benefit. So the second base case uses the operating margin, which leaves out interest, taxes and other income altogether. It also leaves out a one time gain that sits inside operating income. On the earnings call on October 20, 2026, Bret Johnsen said Connectivity's 55% gross margin included a one time benefit of roughly 3%, mainly from tariff refunds. In context he meant about 3 points of that 55% margin, and MarketBeat's report of the call described it the same way, as a one time benefit of roughly three percentage points. ^[2][5][4]

SpaceX did not give a dollar figure for the refund. Three points of Connectivity's third quarter revenue of $5,248 million is about $157 million (Dalsna Finance calculation: 3% times $5,248 million is $157.44 million). Taking that out of operating income of $2,791 million leaves about $2,634 million, an operating margin of about 18.1%. Held for a year, that gives about $10,534 million of operating earnings, or $0.78 per share. Operating income is counted before tax, so this is not net income. It is shown only to apply the same multiples to the quarter without its one time items. ^[1][5]

The table also has an Adjusted EBITDA row at the third quarter's Adjusted EBITDA margin of 60.4%, which is $35,236 million a year, or $2.59 per share. That row still includes the tariff refund, as SpaceX's Adjusted EBITDA does. The P/E multiples apply only to the two earnings rows and the Adjusted EBITDA multiples only to the Adjusted EBITDA row. There is no column for a forward market cap to Adjusted EBITDA, because no estimate was found. The $347.74 cell is high because the trailing multiple of 134.0 is high, and that multiple is high because trailing Adjusted EBITDA was small, at $14,945 million over four quarters. ^[1][2][6][3]

What Elon Musk said, run through the same grid

On the October 20, 2026 earnings call, chief executive Elon Musk said: "So I mean in a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion." The time frame he gave was the end of 2027. Annual recurring revenue is a run rate, meaning the pace of revenue at a point in time stretched over a year, not revenue already earned in a calendar year. This is a company projection, as reported in the call transcript published by TradingKey. ^[5]

The scenarios below take each figure as a year of revenue. Each gets two rows, like the base cases: one at the third quarter's 30.2% net margin and one at the operating margin of about 18.1% with the tariff refund taken out. The margins and the 13,581,063,709 share count are held fixed, and this arithmetic does not test whether either would hold at that size. At $500 billion, earnings would be about $151,081 million, or $11.12 per share, at the net margin and about $90,345 million, or $6.65 per share, at the operating margin. At $1 trillion they would be about $302,161 million, or $22.25 per share, and about $180,690 million, or $13.30 per share (Dalsna Finance calculation). The Adjusted EBITDA multiples are left off this grid because these rows are earnings, not Adjusted EBITDA. ^{[5][1][7][2][8]}

What to watch

On the call, Bret Johnsen said SpaceX expects fourth quarter capital spending of $35 billion to $40 billion and total revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion for the first quarter of 2027. He also said he expects total company gross margins in the fourth quarter to be more consistent with the second quarter, given the one time benefits and customer mix in the third. All three are forecasts: each is a company projection, as reported in the call transcript published by TradingKey. The next report will show how much of the third quarter's margin carries forward, which matters for every row in the grids above. ^[5]

How these figures were made: inputs come from SpaceX's SEC filings, the earnings call transcript and the dated market reports named above. Calculations use unrounded inputs and are rounded only at the end, with multiples to one decimal and per share figures and prices to the cent. ^{[1][2][6][3][7][8][5]}