By Hamza Faisal
Elon Musk told investors on Friday that SpaceX will take in more revenue in the current quarter alone than NASA's entire annual budget. Speaking virtually at the 33rd Annual Baron Investment Conference in New York, Musk said fourth-quarter revenue should rise roughly 70 percent from the third quarter, putting sales near $24.8 billion.
"SpaceX revenue this quarter alone will be substantially higher than NASA's entire annual budget!" Musk wrote in a post on X the same day. The comparison holds on one widely used measure: NASA received $24.4 billion in regular fiscal 2026 appropriations, according to a Congressional Budget Office assessment. The agency also received $10 billion through the 2025 reconciliation law, and Musk did not specify his funding measure.
A $25 billion quarter, driven by AI
The forecast builds on a third quarter in which SpaceX reported $14.58 billion in revenue. Its Super Intelligence unit, which leases computing capacity to other AI developers, generated $7.56 billion, more than half the total and the company's largest segment for the first time. Connectivity, which includes Starlink, contributed $5.25 billion.
Government work is becoming a smaller slice of that business. Musk said federal agencies will account for less than 10 percent of revenue this quarter, down from 16.6 percent in the prior quarter and roughly 20 percent in 2025. Anthropic has replaced NASA as SpaceX's single largest customer, generating more than a third of total revenue, according to Bloomberg.
Musk also repeated his goal of reaching an annualised revenue rate above $100 billion by December, and said it could exceed $500 billion by December 2027. He cautioned investors against treating the figures as guaranteed. "This is not a promise. This is what I think will happen. This is my best guess," he said. SpaceX shares finished Friday up 8.6 percent at $134.27.
StarMind heads to orbit in 2027
Musk also gave the first launch date for StarMind, SpaceX's planned space-based AI computing network. He said the company expects to begin launching StarMind computers, co-designed with NVIDIA, in the third quarter of 2027, with deployments rising sharply in 2028. The network will use NVIDIA's Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, and Musk argued that orbital computing could eventually be far cheaper than data centres on Earth, thanks to continuous solar power and falling launch costs.
SpaceX is also preparing to attempt something it has never done before: catching a returning Starship upper stage with the launch tower's mechanical arms. The attempt is expected in about a week. Starlink is getting a major upgrade too: third-generation satellites offer more than ten times the capability of their predecessors, and Musk said SpaceX will launch ten times as many of them, lifting bandwidth roughly 100-fold.
Terafab and Optimus round out the pitch
On Tesla's side, Musk returned to Terafab, his proposed semiconductor operation in Texas, which aims to eventually produce one terawatt of AI chips a year, roughly 30 times his estimate of global annual production in 2027. A research fabrication facility is being built at Gigafactory Texas in Austin, with first working test chips expected around mid-2027. TSMC confirmed last month that it is in discussions about a potential role in the project. Turning to Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot, Musk suggested robots could eventually deliver at least five times the weekly productivity of human workers.
The ambitions come with heavy spending. SpaceX's capital expenditure reached $19.59 billion in the third quarter, including $16.44 billion for Super Intelligence, and Musk announced the closing of a $40 billion financing in October. The forecasts remain his estimates, not confirmed results.
