Elon Musk
Data verified as of Sep 10, 2026
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) designs, manufactures, and launches reusable rockets and spacecraft. The company operates Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, Starlink, and the government-focused Starshield line while continuing to develop Starship for high-cadence heavy-lift missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Starlink crossed 12 million customers across 160+ countries on June 4, 2026 and the constellation now exceeds 10,400 working satellites in orbit. Following the February 2026 xAI merger, SpaceX also operates the Memphis Colossus supercomputers as an AI hyperscaler, disclosing $14.1B of new Cloud Services Agreements signed in Q2 2026 alone (on top of the Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI compute deals). SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history on June 12, 2026, debuting on Nasdaq under ticker SPCX at its fixed $135-per-share price for a roughly $1.77 trillion valuation and about $75B in proceeds, with Elon Musk retaining ~82% voting control; SPCX slid as low as $107.01 in late July before rebounding to close above its $135 IPO price on August 10, 2026 for the first time since mid-July. Starship returned to flight after the FAA closed the Flight 12 mishap investigation on July 13, 2026: on July 24, 2026 Flight 13 - the second flight of the Version 3 vehicle - deployed the program's first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites and made the softest ship splashdown yet, and recovery crews towed the intact upper stage (Ship 40) through rough seas to Christmas Island, Australia by August 18, 2026 - the first Starship upper stage ever recovered intact after flight - before the semi-submersible vessel Forte departed Christmas Island on August 28, 2026 to carry it roughly 20,000 km back to Starbase, Texas. Days after its IPO, SpaceX agreed on June 16, 2026 to acquire AI coding startup Cursor's parent Anysphere for $60B in an all-stock deal - the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever - and closed the deal on August 15, 2026, ahead of its late-August target, giving Cursor access to SpaceX's GPU fleet including the Colossus supercomputer. SpaceX posted its first earnings as a public company on August 4, 2026 (Q2 revenue of $7.8B, up 92% year over year, narrowing its net loss to $541M), and on August 11 Elon Musk told employees SpaceX's AI compute business would exceed all its other revenue by September 2026 and account for 99% of the company's value within five years, targeting 10 gigawatts of AI compute capacity - up from 1.4 GW at the end of Q2 - by the end of 2027. On August 25 SpaceX announced a $100 billion Starbase Louisiana spaceport in Vermilion Parish, with construction expected in 2027 and a first launch targeted as soon as 2029. A Falcon Heavy flew its 13th mission on August 30, 2026, launching NASA's Roman Space Telescope with both side boosters landing intact at Cape Canaveral, a day after NASA and SpaceX postponed the planned September 12 Crew-13 ISS launch when an oxidizer leak was found in Dragon's propulsion system during prelaunch processing. A mid-August 13F filing also disclosed Nvidia holds roughly $21B of SpaceX stock via its earlier xAI investment, as SpaceX committed on its August 4 earnings call to building its future AI compute exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture. SPCX shares climbed about 7% to close at $150.84 on September 3, 2026 after Oppenheimer raised its price target to $280 from $250 on growing confidence in the AI-compute business, with investors also looking ahead to the approaching Starship Flight 14 test.
Company OverviewRead the long-form profile of SpaceXPartially reusable two-stage medium-lift launch vehicle. The world's most frequently launched orbital rocket.
Operational since 2010 and the primary workhorse for SpaceX commercial, civil, and national-security launches - 100+ Falcon 9 missions flown in 2026 by August 25, with the fleet leader (B1067) reaching a record 37th flight the same day.
Heavy-lift launch vehicle consisting of a strengthened Falcon 9 core with two additional boosters.
Operational since 2018 for heavy national-security, science, and high-energy commercial payloads; flew its 13th mission on August 30, 2026, launching NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with both side boosters landing back at Cape Canaveral and the center core expended.
Reusable spacecraft for cargo and crew transport to the International Space Station.
Cargo missions since 2012 and crew missions since 2020, with regular NASA ISS rotations and private astronaut flights.
Fully reusable super-heavy-lift launch system designed for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. V3 (Block 3) variant with Raptor 3 engines is the production version.
Integrated test campaign underway. The first Starship V3 flew on May 22, 2026 (Flight 12) from Starbase Pad 2, losing the booster on its return burn; Flight 13 on July 24, 2026 was the cleanest mission yet, deploying the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites and bringing both stages to controlled splashdowns, though the satellites reentered with the ship because that flight never reached orbit. The Flight 13 upper stage (Ship 40) was towed intact through rough seas to Christmas Island, Australia by August 18, 2026 - the first Starship upper stage ever recovered intact after flight - and departed for Starbase, Texas aboard the semi-submersible vessel Forte on August 28, 2026, a roughly 20,000 km trip expected to take several weeks; engineers inspected the ship in place at Christmas Island and collected heat-shield samples. Flight 14 (hardware Ship 41 and Booster 21) slipped from a 'late August' target: Isaacman said August 14 he expected early September, but an August 20 airspace-planning briefing pointed to a September 15, 2026 target, and Musk said the first tower catch of the upper stage itself will wait 'a few months' beyond Flight 14. A September 1, 2026 FCC filing confirmed the Flight 14 date and that it will attempt Starship's first genuine orbital insertion, so its ~20 Starlink V3 satellites are meant to actually join the constellation; the booster will return to the launch site for a tower-catch attempt, while the ship itself still targets a splashdown. V3/Block 3 development is now focused on booster catch and reuse, rapid Starlink V3 cadence, and an orbital ship-to-ship propellant-transfer demo ahead of Artemis missions.
Government-focused satellite line built on SpaceX launch systems and Starlink platform technology for secure communications and other national-security missions.
Active government business line positioned alongside Starlink with a focus on secure mission sets for defense and intelligence customers.
AI supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee acquired in the February 2026 xAI merger. Sold as multi-year compute capacity to external AI customers, with disclosed contracts to Anthropic and Google.
Operating at 300+ MW with 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs. Fully leased to Anthropic ($1.25B/month through May 2029) with additional capacity ramping for Google ($920M/month, ~110,000 GPUs, October 2026 through June 2029). Colossus 2, the separate Blackwell/Blackwell-Ultra-generation follow-on system nearby in Memphis, moved from under-construction to operational on September 3, 2026 and was reported as the world's largest AI data center by IT power capacity (roughly 946 MW, with Epoch AI estimating around 1.1 million H100-equivalent compute units, en route to a reported ~1,531 MW in early 2027); it hosts the separate Reflection AI compute deal disclosed in June 2026. Reverified in early September 2026: Colossus 1's own capacity and its Anthropic/Google contract terms are unchanged.
Disk-shaped, uncrewed reentry capsule for returning cargo - such as pharmaceuticals and other orbital-manufacturing output - from low Earth orbit to Earth. SpaceX's entry into the commercial cargo-return market, competing with players like Varda Space Industries.
Debut flight launched on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on June 23, 2026, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 700 nautical miles off the U.S. West Coast; the FAA has approved SpaceX for two prototype Starfall reentry tests, with the second still unflown as of August 20, 2026.
Division
Starlink is SpaceX's satellite internet division and the largest satellite constellation ever flown, with more than 10,900 active satellites in low Earth orbit serving 12M+ customers across 160+ countries as of mid-2026. Reported as SpaceX's Connectivity segment, it generated $11.39B of revenue in 2025 (61% of SpaceX's total, up ~49% year over year) with $7.17B of segment adjusted EBITDA, and grew Q2 2026 quarterly revenue 66% year over year to $4.29B-$4.3B - the profit engine funding Starship and SpaceX's AI-compute buildout. Beyond fixed broadband, Starlink runs maritime, aviation (42 airlines have Starlink Wi-Fi), and Direct to Cell services: the July 2025 T-Satellite launch with T-Mobile made satellite-to-phone service commercial in the US, and the FCC-approved ~$17B EchoStar spectrum purchase (May 2026) positions 'Starlink Mobile' to become a direct consumer carrier competing with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile - though all three have so far publicly declined an MVNO deal. Next-generation V3 satellites - roughly 1 Tbps of downlink capacity each, launchable only on Starship - began deploying operationally on July 24, 2026, with Starship Flight 14 (an FCC filing puts the target at NET September 15, 2026) set to be the vehicle's first genuine orbital-trajectory attempt; V3 underpins plans for gigabit consumer service and a target of ~25M users by year-end 2026. SpaceX raised most residential and aviation Starlink plan prices in mid-2026, and on its first public earnings call as a Nasdaq-listed company (SPCX, Aug 4, 2026) confirmed Starlink's Q2 subscriber and revenue growth and reiterated plans to build its own Starlink Mobile network rather than lease capacity to a wireless carrier. Consumer service went live in the UAE on September 3, 2026 after a 10-year TDRA General Space Services License, and on September 2 SpaceX signed Europe's first Starlink Mobile and Sovereign Solutions deals with 4iG for Hungary, Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia.
Division
xAI is Elon Musk's artificial-intelligence company - founded in March 2023, merged with the X social platform in March 2025, acquired by SpaceX in a $250B all-stock deal on February 2, 2026, and rebranded SpaceXAI on July 6, 2026. It builds the Grok model family, whose latest release, Grok 4.6 (August 12, 2026), reuses Grok 4.5's foundation with improved fine-tuning for long-running agent tasks and coding, scoring 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index to match OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol; Musk said on September 2 that the 2.1-trillion-parameter Grok 4.7 was about 10 days out (around September 12), and as of September 9 it had not yet shipped. Grok Imagine remains the image-and-video generator Musk declared 'done' on July 5, 2026, and Grok features reached ~117 million monthly active users by March 2026 (still the most recent official figure), third in the US behind ChatGPT and Gemini. Its Memphis-area Colossus supercomputer complex - roughly 555,000 Nvidia GPUs expanding toward 2 GW and 1 million GPUs, including Colossus 3 ('MACROHARDRR') and a fourth building, 'Minihard' - has become a business in itself, leased to Anthropic ($1.25B/month for all of Colossus 1), Google ($920M/month from October 2026) and Reflection AI ($150M/month). On August 31, 2026 the Pentagon put Starshield AI's Grok for Government live on GenAI.mil at Impact Level 5 alongside ChatGPT Mil, giving about 3 million DoD personnel access; GenAI.mil had already onboarded more than 1.7 million unique users. On September 3, xAI opened Grok Bot to enterprises, with free usage for Grok and Cursor Enterprise customers. A federal judge denied xAI's preliminary injunction against Minnesota's AI 'nudification' ban on or around September 4, 2026, leaving fines of up to $500,000 per violation in force while xAI appeals to the Eighth Circuit. The combined SpaceX went public on June 12, 2026 in history's largest IPO (~$85.7B raised), fell to a 52-week low of $104.83 on August 3 amid concern over xAI's compute spending, then rebounded to close at $153.47 on September 8, 2026 (market cap about $2.08T), just ahead of a third lockup expiry on September 9 that makes about 319 million more shares eligible to trade; on August 14 SpaceX closed its $60B Cursor (Anysphere) acquisition. The roughly 6-trillion-parameter Grok 5 is still training on Colossus 2 after slipping past two target windows, with no confirmed release date.
Demonstrate Starship V3 booster catch and orbital propellant transfer
Flight 13 succeeded on July 24, 2026 - the program's first operational Starlink V3 deployment (20 satellites) and controlled splashdowns of both stages - clearing SpaceX to attack the harder V3 milestones. Recovery crews spent 24 days towing the intact Flight 13 upper stage (Ship 40) through rough seas across the Indian Ocean, reaching Christmas Island, Australia on August 18, 2026 - the first Starship upper stage ever recovered intact after flight. SpaceX engineers inspected Ship 40 in place, collecting heat-shield samples that Musk said confirmed the heat-shield problem is solved, before loading it onto the semi-submersible vessel Forte, which departed Christmas Island on August 28, 2026 for the roughly 20,000 km trip back to Starbase, Texas. On August 28, 2026 SpaceX also completed a full-duration 33-engine static fire of the Super Heavy booster assigned to Flight 14 at Starbase, following a six-engine static fire of that flight's Ship. Flight 14 (hardware Ship 41 and Booster 21) slipped past its 'late August' target: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said August 14, 2026 that SpaceX was tracking an early-September launch, but an August 20, 2026 airspace-planning briefing for air-traffic managers instead pointed to a September 15, 2026 target. On August 20, 2026 Musk also said Flight 14 will not attempt the first launch-tower catch of the upper stage itself after all; SpaceX now expects to try the ship catch 'in a few months,' pushing the first Starship reflight out to around the end of 2026 or early 2027. A public FCC filing submitted around September 1, 2026 confirmed the September 15, 2026 target and, for the first time, that Flight 14 will attempt a genuine orbital insertion rather than the suborbital arc every prior Starship flight (including Flight 13) has flown - meaning the roughly 20 Starlink V3 satellites it carries are planned to reach an operational orbit and join the constellation, unlike Flight 13's satellites, which reentered with the ship because that flight never reached orbit. The filing also states the Super Heavy booster will return to the launch site for a tower-catch attempt, while the ship itself is still slated for an ocean splashdown rather than a catch. On September 2, 2026 the FAA issued a Finding of No Significant Impact for expanded Pacific reentry contingency landing areas and an additional Starship return trajectory to Starbase, a required environmental step before the Office of Commercial Space Transportation can modify SpaceX's vehicle operator license to use those corridors. Beyond Flight 14, the roadmap runs through flying Starlink V3 on a rapid cadence and demonstrating an orbital ship-to-ship propellant transfer - the in-space refueling demo that FCC filings and the Artemis HLS contract both hinge on.
Next post-IPO lock-up tranche unlocks (~September 9, 2026)
SpaceX's second lock-up tranche - the Day-70 calendar release, ~319 million shares - actually unlocked on August 20, 2026, not August 31 as previously tracked here, and sent SPCX as much as ~6% lower intraday, dipping below its $135 IPO price for the first time since the June debut (see milestoneHistory). The next scheduled release is the similarly sized Day-90 tranche around September 9, 2026, followed by further calendar tranches around September 24 and October 9 and 24, 2026, before the remaining 180-day lock-up on Elon Musk's roughly 6.4B shares expires December 8, 2026.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said August 14, 2026 he is 'extremely confident' Artemis III will launch in 2027, saying NASA tracks 'every single component' of the program 'down to the day, down to the hour' - and tied that confidence directly to SpaceX's Starship cadence, saying that if Flight 14 flies in early September as planned and SpaceX keeps flying roughly every few weeks through year-end, NASA will 'feel very good' about Starship's readiness to contribute to Artemis III. NASA and SpaceX completed wind-tunnel testing of the upgraded Super Heavy V3 booster at NASA Ames in 2026, verifying the aerodynamic loads it will face returning from lunar missions. Artemis III is a late-2027 low-Earth-orbit demonstration testing rendezvous and docking between Orion and uncrewed pathfinder versions of both SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2, with the first crewed lunar landing pushed out to Artemis IV in early 2028. Progress still hinges on SpaceX demonstrating reliable Starship V3 flights - including Flight 14, now expected around September 15, 2026 - and the in-orbit propellant-transfer capability the lunar lander depends on. As of September 4, 2026, Isaacman's August 14 statement remains NASA's most recent public assessment; no new HLS schedule update had been issued since.
Launch Starmind AI1 orbital-compute prototype
SpaceX and Nvidia are jointly developing Starmind, satellites pairing a space-optimized version of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 system (Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs) to run AI workloads from low Earth orbit. On August 24, 2026 Elon Musk said the first-generation AI1 satellite (roughly 20 meters tall, 70 meters wide, about 150 kilowatts peak power and 120 kilowatts average compute) will now launch in Q4 2027, pulled forward from a prior 2028 target, with volume launches and a larger commercial orbital-compute constellation reaching significant scale in 2028. The announcement drove a roughly 3% jump in SpaceX shares.
Start construction of Starbase Louisiana
SpaceX's $100 billion Vermilion Parish spaceport is planned as five launch complexes (two pads each) with on-site propellant production, power generation, vehicle processing and housing. Construction is expected to begin in 2027, with SpaceX targeting a first Starship launch as soon as 2029; Louisiana Economic Development has said initial operations are expected around 2030. The project is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs over 10 years at an average salary of about $92,600.
Build Terafab, a joint SpaceX-Tesla chip factory in Texas
SpaceX and Tesla confirmed on August 6, 2026 that their jointly developed Terafab semiconductor factory will be sited in Grimes County, Texas (Gibbons Creek Reservoir, outside College Station), with an initial investment phase of $16.8 billion and at least 3,000 jobs planned. The vertically integrated, roughly 100-million-square-foot plant, to be operated by SpaceX as the high-volume production site, is designed to make, package and test advanced logic and memory chips, supplying high-power silicon for SpaceX's planned space-based AI data centers as well as Tesla's Optimus and Cybercab compute needs; total investment could reach $119 billion if further phases are built out, though SpaceX's own S-1 has characterized the plan as a non-binding general framework. Intel joined the project in April 2026 as its named foundry partner, committing its next-generation 14A process node - Intel's first major external 14A customer. The Grimes County tax incentives cleared their remaining hurdles in July 2026, when the Iola and Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School Districts approved a combined $1.66 billion in property-tax abatements under the Texas JETI program, following county commissioners' earlier 4-1 vote for a reinvestment zone and 100% county tax abatement. As of mid-August 2026 the Grimes County site was reported to be in site-development, financing, equipment-ordering and early-construction stages; neither company has announced a formal groundbreaking ceremony, a completion date, or a first-output target for the full-scale facility.
Flight 13's July 24, 2026 success - the first operational Starlink V3 deployment - proved Starship V3 can reach space and deploy payloads, but the architecture for regular Mars cargo missions still depends on unproven capabilities: Super Heavy booster catch and rapid reuse, in-space propellant transfer between two Starships, and long-duration ship operations. The Flight 13 upper stage (Ship 40) was itself recovered intact after a 24-day ocean tow to Christmas Island, Australia (arriving August 18, 2026) and departed for Starbase, Texas aboard the vessel Forte on August 28, 2026, giving engineers a first-ever intact post-flight ship to inspect. No Mars-specific test has flown since Flight 13; the near-term gating step remains Flight 14, now targeted for around September 15, 2026 (slipped past its 'late August' target), with the first tower-catch attempt of the upper stage pushed further out to 'a few months' after that. The S-1 explicitly anchors the long-term mission of 'making life multiplanetary' on this architecture.
Scale AI compute capacity toward 10 GW
In an August 11, 2026 address to employees, Elon Musk said SpaceX's AI compute business would exceed all its other revenue lines by September 2026 and 'significantly' exceed them by Q4, and that AI would account for 'probably 99%' of SpaceX's value within five years. On the August 4, 2026 earnings call Musk had already committed SpaceX to building its future AI compute exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture, with an interim target of 2 GW of installed compute online by the end of 2026 - up from 1.4 GW at the end of Q2 2026 - en route to 10 GW by the end of 2027, which he estimated could generate $300B-$500B in annual revenue at a value of $30-$50 per watt.
Fix AI data-center reliability and meet the Google GPU delivery deadline
SpaceX replaced several leaders of its AI data-center build-out in early September 2026 after reliability and civil-engineering problems surfaced at its Tennessee and Mississippi sites, which had run for months without backup cooling or power; the Macrohard facility relied on more than 100 mobile chillers and posted uptime well below SpaceX's internal 99.9% target, with temporary power and cooling contributing to outages that interrupted AI training. Rocket-production executive Wesley Salandro and Starbase operations director Logan McConnell moved in to run data centers as prior leaders Jake Palmer, Zach Wells and Pablo Mendoza departed, while senior Starlink executive Michael Nicolls was installed to oversee xAI. The reshuffle comes ahead of a September 30, 2026 deadline for SpaceX to deliver the GPUs committed under its roughly $920 million-a-month, ~110,000-GPU compute deal with Google; after a one-month grace period, Google can terminate the agreement or accept fewer GPUs with proportionally reduced payments if SpaceX falls short.
NASA had moved up SpaceX's Crew-13 mission from a planned November launch to September 12, 2026 to increase ISS crew-rotation cadence, but on August 29, 2026 NASA and SpaceX postponed that date after an oxidizer leak was detected on Dragon's propulsion system during standard prelaunch processing. Joint teams are running additional tests and data review, with any needed rework to be completed before a new target date is set. The Dragon flight will carry NASA's Jessica Watkins (commander) and Luke Delaney (pilot), CSA's Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos's Sergey Teteryatnikov on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, continuing the Commercial Crew Program's regular ISS rotations.
Hit $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030
On SpaceX's August 4, 2026 earnings call - its first as a public company - Elon Musk pulled the company's internal $1 trillion annual-revenue target forward a year, to 2030 from a prior 2031 goal, and said there is a 'non-zero chance' of reaching it as soon as 2029. Hitting $1T from 2025's $18.67B consolidated revenue base implies a roughly 122% five-year compound annual growth rate, a pace Musk is betting on AI-compute revenue (which he has separately said could reach $300B-$500B annually by the end of 2027) to deliver alongside Starlink and launch. As of September 4, 2026 this remains the standing target; the September 3, 2026 Oppenheimer price-target increase to $280 cited growing analyst confidence in the AI-compute thesis underpinning it, but no revised revenue figure or timeline has been issued since the August 4 call.
4 of 5 announced dates hit · 1 slipped
Launch Crew-13 to the ISS on schedule (September 12, 2026)
Target 2026-09-12 · Resolved Aug 29, 2026
NASA and SpaceX postponed the planned September 12, 2026 Crew-13 launch after detecting an oxidizer leak on Dragon's propulsion system during standard prelaunch processing. Joint teams are running additional tests and data review, with any needed rework completed before a new target date is announced; the mission remains expected to fly once the investigation closes.
Second post-IPO lock-up tranche unlocks (Day-70, ~319M shares)
Target 2026-08-20 (Day-70 calendar lock-up tranche) · Resolved Aug 20, 2026
SpaceX's second post-IPO lock-up tranche unlocked on schedule on August 20, 2026, freeing roughly 319 million additional shares (the Day-70 calendar release under the IPO lock-up agreement). SPCX fell as much as ~6% intraday and closed below its $135 IPO price for the first time since its June debut - a sharper reaction than the far larger August 6 unlock (911.5M shares), which the stock absorbed with a 6% gain. The next scheduled tranche (~319M shares, Day-90) falls around September 9, 2026.
Close $60B Cursor (Anysphere) acquisition
Target Late August 2026 · Resolved Aug 15, 2026
SpaceX officially closed its all-stock acquisition of Cursor-maker Anysphere on August 15, 2026, ahead of the late-August target, giving Cursor access to SpaceX's GPU fleet including the Colossus supercomputer for AI model training. The deal, first agreed June 16, 2026, is the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever; Cursor and SpaceX have already jointly trained Grok models on Cursor's coding data.
Record lock-up unlock and post-earnings stock reaction
Target August 2026 · Resolved Aug 6, 2026
SpaceX's first post-IPO lock-up expired on August 6, 2026 as scheduled, freeing up to 911.5 million insider shares (worth roughly $100B) and more than doubling the public float to about 11.8% of shares outstanding from 4.9%. Despite the dilution, SPCX stock rose about 6.1% that day.
First public earnings report as a public company
Target August 2026 · Resolved Aug 4, 2026
SpaceX posted its first earnings as a public company on August 4, 2026: Q2 revenue of $7.8B (up 92% year over year, beating consensus by nearly $1B) and a narrower-than-expected $541M net loss ($0.09/share). Shares fell on the print as investors weighed AI-infrastructure capex despite the beat. The related August 6 lock-up expiration is a separate, still-upcoming event - see the current nextSteps entry.
Fully operational launch, spacecraft, broadband, government-satellite, and AI-compute business. SpaceX remains the world's leading launch provider, logging its 100th mission of 2026 on August 19 (97th Falcon 9 flight of the year) and its 651st cumulative Falcon-family booster landing the same day - the third straight year it has topped 100 launches. It runs Starlink and Starshield alongside its Falcon and Dragon programs, and returned Starship V3 to flight on July 24, 2026 (Flight 13, the program's cleanest mission yet) after the FAA closed its Flight 12 mishap investigation on July 13; recovery crews then spent 24 days towing the intact Flight 13 upper stage (Ship 40) through rough seas to Christmas Island, Australia by August 18, 2026 - the first Starship upper stage ever recovered intact after flight - before the semi-submersible vessel Forte departed Christmas Island on August 28, 2026 to carry it roughly 20,000 km back to Starbase, Texas. On August 28, 2026 SpaceX also completed a full-duration 33-engine static fire of the Super Heavy booster assigned to Flight 14 at Starbase. Flight 14 slipped past its 'late August' target: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said August 14 he expected early September, but an August 20 airspace-planning briefing pointed to a September 15, 2026 target, and Musk said the first tower catch of the upper stage itself will wait 'a few months' beyond Flight 14. A Falcon Heavy separately flew its 13th mission on August 30, 2026, launching NASA's Roman Space Telescope with both side boosters landing back at Cape Canaveral. NASA and SpaceX postponed the planned September 12, 2026 Crew-13 ISS launch on August 29, 2026 after finding an oxidizer leak in Dragon's propulsion system during prelaunch processing, with a new target date pending investigation. SpaceX posted its first earnings as a public company on August 4, 2026 (Q2 2026 revenue of $7.8B, up 92% year over year, narrowing its net loss to $541M) and absorbed an August 6 lock-up expiration that freed roughly 911.5M shares (~$116B) without derailing the stock, which climbed back above its $135 IPO price in mid-August before a second, ~319M-share lock-up tranche on August 20 briefly pushed it back below $135; shares closed at $141.50 on August 30, then rose about 7% to $150.84 on September 3 after Oppenheimer raised its price target to $280 from $250 on rising confidence in the AI-compute business, with Starship Flight 14 (now targeted around September 15) as the next catalyst investors are watching. On August 4 Musk also pulled SpaceX's internal $1 trillion annual-revenue target forward to 2030 and committed SpaceX to building its future AI compute exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture, targeting 2 GW installed by the end of 2026 en route to 10 GW by the end of 2027; a 13F filing disclosed August 14, 2026 that Nvidia in turn holds roughly $21B of SpaceX stock via its earlier xAI investment. Following the February 2026 xAI merger, SpaceX also operates the Memphis Colossus supercomputers as an AI hyperscaler, with disclosed multi-year compute contracts worth $80B+ to Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI plus $14.1B of new Cloud Services Agreements signed in Q2 2026 alone; on August 11, 2026 Elon Musk told employees SpaceX's AI compute revenue would exceed all its other business lines by September 2026 and account for 99% of company value within five years. The same week SpaceX disclosed Starlink had grown past 13M consumer subscribers and 22M monthly Starlink Mobile users. SpaceX closed its $60B acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor's parent Anysphere on August 15, 2026. Press reporting in August 2026 also tallies SpaceX's Golden Dome missile-defense contract awards at more than $8B.
Recurring broadband subscriptions for residential, roaming, maritime, aviation, enterprise, and government users on the Starlink network - SpaceX's largest and only profitable segment, generating ~$11.4B of connectivity revenue in 2025 ($3.3B in Q1 2026).
Starlink Mobile (Direct-to-Cell)
Direct-to-cell service for messaging, voice, data, and IoT connectivity, currently sold through carrier partners (T-Mobile, Rogers, KDDI, One NZ, Optus, Telstra, Salt, Entel Peru, Entel Chile, Kyivstar, Virgin Media O2). With the FCC's May 2026 approval of its ~$17B EchoStar mid-band spectrum purchase, SpaceX is moving toward selling Starlink Mobile directly to US consumers and competing with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
Dragon missions for NASA crew rotation, cargo resupply, and private astronaut flights to the International Space Station.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches for commercial satellite operators, including rideshare missions at $275K for 50 kg to SSO.
Launch services for U.S. Space Force and NRO missions, including Phase 3 Lane 2 national security launch awards, plus the growing Golden Dome missile-defense book: a $4.16B Space Force AMTI satellite award and $2.29B Space Data Network Backbone award in May 2026 put SpaceX's confirmed Golden Dome-specific contracts at roughly $6.45B, and press reporting on August 20, 2026 that also counts the $1.6B, 18-launch Space-Based Sensing and Targeting order (awarded July 29, 2026) toward the program puts SpaceX's total Golden Dome-related awards above $8B - at least a third of Golden Dome contracts issued to date.
Starshield Government Services
Government-focused satellite services built on SpaceX launch and Starlink platform capabilities for secure communications and other national-security missions.
AI Compute Services (Colossus)
Multi-year GPU compute capacity sold to external AI customers from the Memphis Colossus supercomputers (Colossus 1 acquired in the February 2026 xAI merger). Disclosed customers include Anthropic ($1.25B/month for the full ~220,000-GPU, 300 MW Colossus 1 capacity through May 2029), Google ($920M/month for ~110,000 GPUs from October 2026 through June 2029), and Reflection AI (up to $6.3B, ~$150M/month from July 2026 through 2029 for NVIDIA GB300 capacity at Colossus 2). Colossus 2 - previously under construction - became operational September 3, 2026 and was reported as the world's largest AI data center by IT power capacity (roughly 946 MW, with Epoch AI estimating around 1.1 million H100-equivalent compute units), giving SpaceX a second large leasable facility alongside Colossus 1.
SpaceX absorbs xAI in an all-stock deal in February 2026, then on May 20, 2026 files a public S-1 to list on Nasdaq under ticker SPCX at an implied valuation near $1.75T, with pricing expected June 11. The filing discloses $18.67B in 2025 consolidated revenue, a $2.59B operating loss, and $6.58B adjusted EBITDA.
On May 22, 2026 the first Starship V3 launches from Starbase Pad 2. The upper stage completes a full-duration suborbital flight, deploys 22 Starlink simulators, and splashes down in the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy booster is lost during its return burn.
On May 27, 2026 the FAA formally classifies Starship Flight 12 as a mishap and requires SpaceX to complete an investigation - overseen by the agency - before Flight 13 can fly. The Super Heavy booster had failed to ignite all planned engines during its boostback maneuver, cutting the burn short and ending in the loss of the booster.
On May 29, 2026 the U.S. Space Force awards SpaceX a $4.16B contract to build a low-Earth-orbit constellation of airborne moving target indicator (AMTI) satellites for the Golden Dome homeland missile-defense initiative. The single award exceeds the combined prototype contracts of every other Golden Dome bidder and lifts SpaceX's total Golden Dome book to roughly $6.45B.
On June 12, 2026 SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq under ticker SPCX, selling 555.6M Class A shares at the fixed $135 price to raise roughly $75B at a ~$1.77T valuation - the largest IPO in history, eclipsing Saudi Aramco's 2019 record. Reported total demand exceeded $250B with an unusually large retail allocation of up to 30% of the offering, and Elon Musk retained ~82% voting control through a multi-class share structure.
On June 3, 2026 SpaceX sets a fixed $135-per-share price for its Nasdaq IPO, targeting a $1.77T valuation and ~$75B in proceeds - the largest public offering in history. The roadshow opens June 4 with 555.6M shares on offer, Goldman Sachs leading a syndicate that includes Morgan Stanley, BofA, Citi and JPMorgan, trading expected to start under ticker SPCX on June 12, and Elon Musk retaining ~82% voting control.
On May 6, 2026 SpaceX and Anthropic announce a multi-year compute agreement under which Anthropic will use the full capacity of SpaceX's Memphis Colossus 1 data center - more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and 300 MW - for $1.25B per month through May 2029. The deal is the first major external customer for SpaceX's post-xAI-merger AI hyperscaler business.
An amended SpaceX S-1 disclosed June 5, 2026 reveals a multi-year cloud-services agreement with Alphabet's Google under which Google will pay $920M/month from October 2026 through June 2029 - about $30B in aggregate - for ~110,000 NVIDIA GPUs plus CPUs, memory, and related infrastructure routed through Memphis Colossus 1. With 90-day mutual termination rights after Dec. 31, 2026, the pact lifts SpaceX's disclosed AI-compute backlog above $70B alongside the May Anthropic deal, days before the Nasdaq SPCX debut.
On June 4, 2026 SpaceX announces Starlink has surpassed 12 million active customers across more than 160 countries and territories, with ~27,700 new customers added per day on average over the prior ~53 days. The constellation now exceeds 10,400 working satellites in orbit, and SpaceX uses the milestone to outline V3 satellite plans that target greater-than-100x available bandwidth at a lower 350 km operating altitude.
On June 8, 2026 - days after SpaceX's Nasdaq debut - Falcon 9 booster B1067 launched and landed for a record 35th time on the Starlink 10-35 mission from Cape Canaveral, the most flights ever by an orbital-class rocket stage. The milestone puts Falcon 9 within reach of the 39-flight reuse mark set by NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, which SpaceX intends to surpass as it certifies boosters for up to 40 flights.
On June 22, 2026 SpaceX agreed a multi-year cloud-compute deal worth up to $6.3B under which open-source AI startup Reflection will rent capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, paying about $150M per month from July 1, 2026 through 2029 for access to NVIDIA GB300 chips. Reflection - focused on open-source models for government and national-security customers - joins Anthropic, Google and Cursor as a disclosed Colossus customer, deepening SpaceX's commercialization of its post-xAI-merger AI hyperscaler business.
On June 22, 2026 - ten days after its record IPO - SpaceX launched its first-ever investment-grade bond offering, and on June 23 priced it at $25B of senior unsecured notes, upsized from an initial $20B target after demand topped roughly $89B. The five-tranche deal (coupons from 5.350% on notes due 2031 to 6.650% on notes due 2056) settled June 26 and largely refinances a $20B bridge loan taken on in March. Offering documents disclosed roughly $100.8B in cash and equivalents as of June 19, 2026 and investment-grade ratings from Moody's, Fitch and S&P; SPCX shares fell more than 10% on the day the sale launched and over 20% across five sessions as investors weighed the pace of capital raising.
In May 2026 the FCC approved SpaceX's ~$17B acquisition of EchoStar spectrum (part of a broader ~$40B sale that also gave AT&T 50 MHz), handing SpaceX 65 MHz of exclusive-use, contiguous nationwide mid-band spectrum (AWS-4, AWS-3, H-Block in the 1.9–2.2 GHz range) - its first dedicated direct-to-device spectrum, with licenses fully transferring by ~November 2027. On June 26, 2026 President Gwynne Shotwell told IPO-roadshow investors SpaceX plans to take Starlink Mobile directly to US consumers and compete head-on with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, potentially building its own terrestrial network.
On June 23, 2026 SpaceX launched the debut flight of Starfall, a disk-shaped cargo reentry capsule, on a Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. About 3.1 meters in diameter and able to carry roughly 1,000 kg, the vehicle is designed to return research and orbital-manufacturing payloads - such as pharmaceuticals - to Earth, splashing down about 700 nautical miles off the U.S. West Coast. The mission marks SpaceX's entry into the commercial cargo-return market and is the first of at least two planned Starfall demonstrations.
SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 index effective July 7, 2026 - only 15 trading days after its record June 12 IPO - under Nasdaq's new fast-track rule that admits mega-listings on their 15th trading day. The inclusion forces the more than $800B of funds tracking the index to buy SPCX, though its initial weighting starts small (an estimated 0.5%-0.7%) because less than 5% of its shares trade freely. It makes SpaceX one of the first launch companies in a major U.S. large-cap benchmark.
On July 16, 2026 - SpaceX's first Starship launch attempt since its June Nasdaq debut - the Flight 13 countdown triggered an automatic abort when at least four of Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite during the startup sequence. The flight, carrying the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites, was scrubbed at Starbase. Elon Musk said two Raptor engines would be removed and replaced 'to be confident of a good flight,' with the next attempt most likely early the following week.
On July 24, 2026 SpaceX flew Starship Flight 13 from Starbase, Texas, the second flight of the Version 3 vehicle and its cleanest mission to date. Super Heavy lit all 33 Raptor 3 engines at liftoff and made a controlled offshore splashdown, though only about five of its planned landing-burn engines relit and it came down faster than intended. The upper stage reached space, deployed the program's first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites - SpaceX later confirmed contact with all 20 - and performed the program's softest ship splashdown yet in the Indian Ocean. Each V3 satellite is designed for roughly 1 Tbps of downlink, and a full 60-satellite Starship load can add about 60 Tbps, some 20 times a Falcon 9 batch of V2 Mini satellites.
On July 29, 2026 the U.S. Space Force awarded SpaceX two task orders worth $1.6B for 18 Falcon 9 launches carrying Space-Based Sensing and Targeting satellites - an orbital early-warning system for spotting airborne threats - from Vandenberg Space Force Base through the end of 2027. The award, issued under the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program, pushes SpaceX's 2026 Space Force contract total above $8B.
On July 30, 2026 a Falcon 9 launches the classified NROL-95 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 program. Booster B1096 flies its seventh mission and lands at Landing Zone 2; payload deployment coverage is withheld at the NRO's request.
Four days after its Nasdaq debut, SpaceX confirmed on June 16, 2026 it will acquire Anysphere, the AI coding startup behind Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing Anysphere at $60B - the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever. SpaceX's wholly owned merger subsidiary X67 Inc. will absorb Anysphere, whose shareholders receive SpaceX Class A stock based on a seven-trading-day volume-weighted average price ahead of closing; the deal follows an April 2026 option giving SpaceX the choice between a $10B compute partnership or the full buyout, and is expected to close in Q3 2026 pending regulatory approval.
SpaceX posted its first quarterly results as a public company on August 4, 2026: Q2 2026 revenue of $7.8B, up 92% year over year and beating the roughly $6.7-6.8B consensus by nearly $1B, with a narrower-than-expected net loss of $541M ($0.09/share) versus a ~$0.26 consensus estimate. The company disclosed $47.5B in backlog, $100B of cash on hand, and $18.4B of capex for the quarter (including $15.83B on AI infrastructure). On the same call Musk committed SpaceX to building its future AI compute exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture, targeting 2 GW of installed compute online by the end of 2026 - up from 1.4 GW at quarter-end - en route to 10 GW by the end of 2027.
SpaceX's first post-IPO lock-up expired on August 6, 2026 as scheduled, freeing up to 911.5 million insider shares (worth roughly $116B) and more than doubling the public float to about 11.8% of shares outstanding from 4.9%. Despite the dilution, SPCX rose about 6.1% that day and went on to close back above its $135 IPO price on August 10, 2026 for the first time since mid-July.
SpaceX publicly posted a Musk-hosted employee all-hands meeting on August 11, 2026 disclosing that Starlink had grown past 13 million consumer subscribers - up from 12M at the June 30 close of Q2 - and 22 million monthly Starlink Mobile (direct-to-cell) users. In the same address Musk pulled SpaceX's internal $1 trillion annual-revenue target forward to 2030.
SpaceX officially closed its all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the AI coding startup behind Cursor, on August 15, 2026 - ahead of the late-August target set when the deal was agreed June 16, 2026. Cursor gains access to SpaceX's GPU fleet, including the Colossus supercomputer, to scale AI model training; the companies say they have already jointly trained Grok models using trillions of tokens of Cursor's coding data, extending SpaceX's AI-compute push that began with the February 2026 xAI merger.
SpaceX flew its 100th mission of 2026 on August 19 - a 24-satellite Starlink launch from Vandenberg that was also the year's 97th Falcon 9 flight - making it the third consecutive year SpaceX has topped 100 launches, reached about two months faster than in 2024. Booster B1097 landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You for the mission's cumulative 651st Falcon-family booster landing, five days after booster B1088 notched the 650th landing during a record 38.5-minute back-to-back Falcon 9 launch pair for Globalstar and a classified Space Force payload.
SpaceX flew its final planned Falcon 9 Starlink mission from Florida on August 25, 2026, closing out roughly seven years and about 260 Starlink launches from Cape Canaveral's Pad 40 on that rocket. Going forward, all Florida Starlink launches will fly on Starship, with Falcon 9 Starlink missions continuing only from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the West Coast.
SpaceX announced on August 25, 2026 a $100 billion investment to build its fourth and largest launch site at Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, on former Exxon land. The planned campus includes five launch complexes of two pads each plus propellant production, power generation, vehicle processing and employee housing, with 3,000 direct jobs at an average salary of about $92,600. Construction is expected to begin in 2027, with SpaceX targeting a first launch as soon as 2029; Louisiana Economic Development has said initial operations are expected around 2030. Under the local incentive agreement, SpaceX will pay Vermilion Parish $25 million annually for 25 years (plus a $20 million upfront payment) and is offering area residents a 50% discount on Starlink internet service.
SpaceX's second post-IPO lock-up tranche unlocked on August 20, 2026 - the Day-70 calendar release under the IPO lock-up agreement - freeing roughly 319 million additional shares. SPCX fell as much as ~6% intraday and closed below its $135 IPO price for the first time since the June debut, a sharper reaction than the much larger August 6 unlock (911.5M shares), which the stock had absorbed with a 6% gain.
On August 25, 2026 SpaceX flew its 100th Falcon 9 mission of the year - Starlink 10-49 from Cape Canaveral - with booster B1067 (in service since June 2021) setting a new individual-booster reuse record on its 37th flight and landing, closing in on the Space Shuttle orbiter fleet's all-time reuse record of 39.
After 24 days battling rough seas in the Indian Ocean - and despite Elon Musk warning on August 7, 2026 that the odds were 'not looking good' - SpaceX recovery crews towed the intact Starship Flight 13 upper stage (Ship 40) to waters off Christmas Island, Australia by August 18, 2026, the first Starship upper stage ever recovered intact after a spaceflight. Engineers inspected the ship in place and collected heat-shield samples before loading it onto the semi-submersible transport vessel Forte, which departed Christmas Island on August 28, 2026 for the roughly 20,000 km voyage back to Starbase, Texas, expected to take several weeks.
A 13F filing made public August 14, 2026 shows Nvidia held about 122.8 million SpaceX Class A shares worth roughly $21B at the end of Q2 2026 - SpaceX's second-largest public equity holding for Nvidia, about 33% of its 13F portfolio. The stake traces to Nvidia's $10B investment in xAI as part of a $20B round in January 2026, converted into SpaceX shares when SpaceX absorbed xAI in February 2026 and then into public SPCX stock at the June IPO.
Press reporting on August 20, 2026 tallied SpaceX's disclosed Golden Dome-related federal awards - the $4.16B SB-AMTI satellite contract and $2.29B Space Data Network Backbone contract from May 2026, plus the $1.6B Space-Based Sensing and Targeting Falcon 9 launch order from July 2026 - at more than $8B, above the roughly $6B SpaceX itself had confirmed on its August earnings call and representing at least a third of Golden Dome contracts issued to date.
On August 30, 2026 a Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA's $4.3B Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope toward the Sun-Earth L2 point - the rocket's 13th flight. Both side boosters landed back at Cape Canaveral (Landing Zone 2 and Landing Zone 40) while the center core was expended; Roman separated from the upper stage about 31 minutes after liftoff.
On August 28, 2026 SpaceX fired all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster assigned to Starship Flight 14 for a full-duration static fire at the Starbase, Texas launch pad, posting video of the test the same day. The booster run follows a six-engine static fire of Flight 14's Ship and is a key ground-test gate before Starship's first planned orbital-class flight, which is also expected to deploy next-generation Starlink V3 satellites.
On September 2, 2026 the FAA published a Final Tiered Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact for SpaceX Starship reentry contingency operations in the Pacific Ocean and an additional landing trajectory back to the Boca Chica launch site, with the Federal Register notice following on September 4. The review would support a later license modification adding a Northern Pacific Contingency Landing Area, expanding two existing Pacific splashdown zones, and authorizing temporary airspace closures for a new return-to-launch-site path. The FONSI is an environmental clearance, not itself a flight authorization or a Flight 14 date.
On September 10, 2026 at 8:42 a.m. PT, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base carrying the classified USSF-153 mission for the U.S. Space Force. The first-stage booster was on its 27th flight and, after stage separation, landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific. The payload remains undisclosed. The Debrief reported the flight as SpaceX's 104th Falcon 9 mission of 2026.
Cumulative disclosed raise · dated rounds
