BTC Current Affairs

SpaceX Posts Stellar Earnings, But the Stock's Already Tanking

2026-08-05

SpaceX just delivered a proper barnstormer of an earnings beat. Second-quarter revenue hit $7.8 billion—a 92% jump year-on-year—and Wall Street's consensus of $6.8 billion looked downright quaint by comparison. Net loss shrank to $541 million from $1 billion the year before. Adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled. The AI segment alone chugged past expectations, hauling in $2.561 billion against forecasts of $2.18 billion.

Stock down over 10% in pre-market trading anyway.

This is what happens when the operational story and the financial story have a fistfight in public. The culprit: capital expenditure. SpaceX dropped $18.4 billion on capex last quarter. That's north of $8 billion more than the prior three months and well clear of analyst forecasts around $13 billion. Over 80% of it went toward AI infrastructure—Elon's bid to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, Amazon and Google on compute capacity.

JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth isn't messing about. He's projecting capex of nearly $200 billion in both 2027 and 2028. That's the kind of number that makes free cash flow look like a distant memory. Elon says the spending means the company will end this year with over 2GW of compute, up from 1.4GW at quarter-end. The ambition's there. Whether it'll pay off is another question entirely.

Then there's the bitcoin situation. SpaceX's balance sheet now reveals 18,712 BTC—worth $1.098 billion as of 30 June. Fair-value accounting means the first half of 2026 saw a $539 million markdown on paper. Still, the position sits $437 million in unrealized profit overall. The real headache? Marking $1.45 billion in Bitcoin to market every quarter creates a wild roulette wheel of reported earnings swings that have nothing to do with rockets or satellites. Pure accounting noise. But Wall Street notices noise.

There's a timing bomb, too. A lockup expiration later this week frees up 911.5 million shares—that's 12% of the total, and more than the 640 million currently trading. Over $100 billion in shares hitting the market. Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky made a sharp observation: many holders have pledged their stock to finance homes and other assets. They need to sell. When enough people need to sell, price pressure follows as surely as night follows day.

Not everyone's turned bear. Anmuth was genuinely impressed by the revenue run-rate and Elon's claim that annual revenue could hit $100 billion by year-end. Revenue nearly doubled, EBITDA tripled, and each business line—rockets, Starlink connectivity, and AI—cleared expectations.

The tension's real, though. SpaceX is operationally firing on all cylinders. But the market's spooked by whether the cash machine can sustain this growth model. Then there's Terafab, the AI chip manufacturing facility in East Texas that SpaceX is building with Tesla and Intel. Full buildout could cost $119 billion. Management's clearly betting the farm on AI. Whether the public market believes that bet will pay off is a question the lockup expiration is about to answer in real time.

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