The profit figure would have been higher without $1.2 billion in one-off stock-based compensation tied to the Cursor acquisition, and the headline revenue was lifted by roughly $1 billion from recovering Bitcoin prices plus unspecified related-party income. Overall, the strong quarter pushed SpaceX to $4.4 billion in net income, a swing from a $1 billion loss a year earlier, though it remains $413 million in the red for the first nine months of the year.

Growth is coming at a steep price: capital expenditures hit $19.6 billion in the quarter, and CFO Bret Johnsen told investors the company will spend $35 billion to $40 billion on new capital investments in the fourth quarter. Much of that is going into Colossus II, a second data centre project in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk says he is now spending four days a week. Musk argued the bottleneck for deploying what he calls super intelligence is power, cooling and infrastructure rather than chips, and said SpaceX is using metal-casting techniques developed for its rockets to make turbine components, sidestepping the 12 to 18 month delays turbine manufacturers face.

The company is not abandoning space entirely. Starlink subscriptions reached 13.6 million consumers, and Musk said the next Starship test flight, expected in November, will attempt to recover both the booster and the second stage, which he called a "massive technology milestone" ahead of the harder goal of reflying both.