SpaceX is a public company now. Here's what it does

What the company actually does

SpaceX is an American aerospace company founded by Elon Musk in 2002. The phrase "rocket company" undersells it now. It runs three businesses, and only one of them launches anything.

• Space - the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the giant Starship vehicle, and Dragon capsules that carry cargo and crews.
• Connectivity - Starlink, a satellite-internet service with more than 12 million subscribers.
• AI - a cloud-computing arm built around Musk's xAI, which SpaceX merged with in February 2026.

The space business is the one people picture, and its backstory is a survival story. After three failed launches nearly bankrupted the company, the fourth Falcon 1 flight finally reached orbit on September 28, 2008. Four years later a Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. In May 2020, Crew Dragon flew NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station, the first crewed American orbital launch in nine years. In December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed upright for the first time. That one landing quietly reorganized the economics of spaceflight.

The other two divisions are newer and, by revenue, larger. Starlink beams broadband from more than 10,000 satellites to people in roughly 160 countries. The AI arm sells computing power and just agreed to buy Cursor, a coding-tool maker, for about $60 billion in stock. A rocket company that also runs the internet and the cloud - that mix is the entire story.

The biggest IPO in history

The June listing was enormous in every dimension. The company priced 555.6 million shares at $135 and raised $75 billion, with an option to sell more. By the close of June 12, the whole company was worth about $2.1 trillion. President Gwynne Shotwell put it plainly: 'Today, we make history again, and we have a history of making history.'

That confession is the detail worth keeping. The person who founded the company expected it to fail, and it nearly did in 2008. Eighteen years later it staged the biggest public offering in history. Whatever anyone thinks of Musk - and opinions differ wildly - the full circle is hard to look away from.

What the first earnings report showed

On August 4, SpaceX reported its first quarter as a public company. Revenue hit $7.8 billion, up 92 percent from a year earlier. The headline growth was real. The details underneath it mattered more.

Starlink, the home-internet business, brought in $4.29 billion and was the only segment to turn an operating profit. The AI division took in $2.56 billion and lost money. Launches, the famous part, brought in $962 million and also lost money. Read that again: the rocket company's smallest business is rockets.

The same report explained the stock's wobble. SpaceX spent about $18.4 billion in the quarter, roughly $15.8 billion of it on AI computers. Musk told investors the company is on track for $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, a milestone he waved off as 'what we would achieve if we basically did nothing,' and $1 trillion a year by 2030, pulled forward from 2031. Hitting that means compounding at close to 118 percent a year, by The Motley Fool's math. That is the difference between a forecast and a wish.

So what is it worth?

The answer depends on whether you believe the AI story. Morgan Stanley, which helped take SpaceX public, rates the stock a buy with a $300 price target. Analyst Adam Jonas calls it 'a potential generational compounder that converts energy into a networked/swarming intelligence at scale.' More than half of that $300 target hangs on the AI division, not the rockets.

Skeptics point to the price: about 64 times sales. A company priced like that leaves no cushion for a bad quarter. In early August, a lockup expired that freed more than 900 million insider shares, worth about $101 billion, to be sold for the first time. The stock dipped 13.6 percent on August 5, then recovered the next day. No stampede came. That either means the believers are right, or that the exit is slower than it looks.

Here is the part worth holding onto. A company that started with a founder giving it a less-than-ten-percent chance now lands its boosters on a drone ship named Of Course I Still Love You, sells internet to twelve million people, and just staged the largest public offering in history. The stock will do what stocks do. The underlying thing is stranger and better: a rocketship company that became an internet company, and is now trying to become an AI company - without ever stopping the part where giant tubes fall from the sky and land on their feet.