Key Notes
- Musk forecasts roughly 70% sequential revenue growth, implying about $24.8 billion in fourth-quarter sales.
- His NASA comparison depends on the funding measure, with regular fiscal 2026 appropriations of $24.4 billion excluding supplemental money.
- SPCX closed Friday up 8.6% at $134.27, recovering most of Thursday’s drop but remaining below Wednesday’s close.
SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) expects fourth-quarter revenue to rise roughly 70% from the preceding quarter, Elon Musk said Friday, offering a sharp growth forecast as the stock recovered from a punishing selloff. The projection would put quarterly sales near $24.8 billion, a scale Musk compared with NASA’s entire annual budget.
Musk outlined the growth expectation at the Baron Investment Conference, according to Benzinga’s conference update. It remains a forecast for the quarter ending December 31. SpaceX’s most recent reported quarter produced $14.575 billion in revenue.
In a separate post on X, Musk used NASA as a benchmark for the company’s expansion beyond its original launch business.
SpaceX revenue this quarter alone will be substantially higher than NASA’s entire annual budget!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2026
The NASA Comparison Depends on the Budget Measure
A 70% increase on SpaceX’s September-quarter revenue would produce about $24.78 billion in sales. NASA received $24.4 billion in regular fiscal 2026 appropriations for the activities covered by a Congressional Budget Office budget assessment. On that measure, the implied SpaceX figure would be slightly higher.
Musk did not identify a fiscal year or funding definition in his post. That matters because regular appropriations do not capture every source of NASA funding. The agency also received $10 billion through the 2025 reconciliation law, as the Congressional Research Service documents. Adding multiyear supplemental funding to one annual allocation requires attention to when the money becomes available.
The comparison illustrates SpaceX’s commercial scale, but it does not establish that the company has already earned more than every measure of NASA’s annual resources. One figure is expected corporate sales over three months; the other finances a public agency’s wider portfolio of spaceflight, science and research.
AI and Starlink Reshape the Business
SpaceX’s quarterly results show how far its revenue mix has shifted. Super Intelligence generated $7.56 billion in third-quarter sales, more than half the total. Connectivity, which includes Starlink, supplied $5.25 billion, while the Space segment contributed $1.77 billion.
Profit came from a different mix. Connectivity produced $2.37 billion in operating income, compared with $431 million for Super Intelligence. AI was the largest sales business; the satellite network remained the larger operating-profit contributor.
The September results leave shareholders assessing two different businesses: rapidly expanding computing services and a satellite network supplying much of the operating profit.
Government work is becoming a smaller share of that broader group. Musk expects federal agencies to account for less than 10% of revenue this quarter, compared with 16.6% in the preceding period, Bloomberg reported. A falling percentage does not itself mean government payments are falling: a much larger commercial business can reduce their share even if those contracts remain substantial.
SPCX Rebounds but Has More Ground to Recover
SpaceX shares finished Friday at $134.27, up $10.65, or 8.6%, from Thursday’s $123.62 close, according to Yahoo Finance market data. The gain followed a 9% decline in the previous session.
The recovery was already underway before the afternoon conference remarks. SPCX was up about 6.3% in the late-morning snapshot covered in our earlier market update, alongside a broader rebound in technology shares. Friday’s closing price was still about 1.2% below Wednesday’s $135.92 finish.
Musk also reiterated a goal of reaching a $100 billion annualized revenue rate in December, according to the Benzinga update. That describes the pace of sales at a particular point, extrapolated over a year. It is not a prediction that SpaceX will book $100 billion during calendar 2026.
Rapid Growth Still Requires Heavy Financing
The latest accounts put third-quarter capital expenditure at $19.59 billion, including $16.44 billion in Super Intelligence. Sales growth alone does not cover that investment bill; the timing of customer payments and the cost of financing new equipment remain central to the stock’s economics.
SpaceX has already secured another large source of funding. Musk announced the closing of a $40 billion financing in October, primarily for graphics processors expected to arrive in the first and second quarters of 2027. He said those purchases would not be a major factor in the current quarter.
The revenue acceleration Musk expects by December will show up in the next earnings report. The hardware arriving next year carries a longer obligation: SpaceX must keep finding customers willing to pay enough for computing capacity to cover the cost of building it.
