After closing slightly in the red, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock price shot up after the October 20 evening bell, soaring 8.06% in the after-hours session and extending its gains to 9.11% in the Wednesday pre-market.
The move sent SPCX shares $13.36 higher than its latest close and to $161.25 – to highs not seen since the brief, early October upsurge.
This sudden reversal was driven by SpaceX’s latest earnings report, covering the third quarter (Q3) of 2026.
Looking at the numbers, Elon Musk’s newer public company not only beat analyst revenue forecasts, disclosing $14.58 billion instead of the anticipated $12.72 billion, but also saw its sales effectively double from $7.81 billion in Q2.
Earnings per share (EPS) was likewise impressive, coming in at $0.45. For comparison, Wall Street was expecting $0.13 and, in Q2, SpaceX recorded a loss per share of $0.09.
Starlink and xAI drove SpaceX Q3 growth
Additionally, Starlink’s subscriber base grew to 13.6 million, and the artificial intelligence (AI) segment saw its revenue jump to $7.56 billion. In the same quarter of 2025, the number stood at $813 million.
Notably, much of the AI-related growth – now termed super intelligence (SI) per President Donald Trump’s instructions – appears linked to data center contracts with companies such as Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Anthropic.
Indeed, SpaceX signed contracts with the two firms that would, combined, bring in approximately $6 billion per quarter, and the filing itself states that the firm ‘added $6.7 billion of incremental SI solutions and infrastructure revenue year-over-year, driven by cloud services agreements, the acquisition of Cursor, and our growing SI models and software applications, including Grok Bot.’
SpaceX CFO puts Q1 revenue at $37 billion, Musk 2027 sales at $1 trillion
Finally, the earnings featured several optimistic forward-looking statements. CFO Bret Johnsen estimated that SpaceX will bring in between $33 billion and $37 billion in Q1 2027, and Elon Musk described annual sales reaching $1 trillion at the high end by the end of next year as plausible.
If the company’s revenue continued doubling each quarter relative to the previous, 2027 revenue will have reached roughly $875 billion. Under this assumption, SpaceX sales in Q1 will stand at roughly $58 billion and in Q4 of the next year at over $466 billion.
Notably, Johnson’s statement regarding Q1 contradicts such a trajectory, though the possible merger with Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) could significantly alter the math.
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