SpaceX, Uber and the Future of Mobility

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:22)
This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, SpaceX's first earnings reveal massive AI spending ambitious, Starlink expansion, and Elon Musk's latest bold prediction, $100 billion annual revenue run rate by year end. Plus, we speak with Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, and joins us to discuss the company's earnings and its robo taxi ambitions. And more robo taxi talkers were joined by the CEO of Zoox later this hour on a big commercial milestone for the company. SpaceX's first ever quarterly earnings. So the stock is down, this is what it looks like, it's been on track for its biggest drop since June 22 Okay, it only started trading June 12th, but it is much further below its IPO price of $135 a share. There's a lot of stories and a lot of numbers that we need to go through, but today's big number, $1 trillion.
That's how much Elon Musk expects SpaceX revenue to hit in 2030 Everything you need to know, Bloomberg's Lauren Grush covering all things space joins us now. So let's go over the quarter that was, the numbers that we need to hear about, what the stories were in SpaceX's first ever earnings and earnings call.

**Lauren Grush** (1:30)
Right. So I think it paints a pretty similar picture to the one that we saw merge ahead of the IPO. Obviously, revenue is up, but it's still a cash burning business.
Of the three segments, the one that's really the one bringing in the numbers at the moment, is the connectivity segment, the Starlink segment, the space segment, what they've built their business on, rocket launches, that is making some gains in terms of revenue, but still holding relatively steady. Then of course, the newly acquired AI segment, that is really the big source of the cash burn for the company. As SpaceX CFO, Brett Johnson mentioned, we can expect to see capital expenditure on par with what we saw this quarter for the next two quarters.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:18)
There was a lot of discussion of Starship as well. Starship, of course, is central to the future ambitions the company has. But what do we really learn about it? What is it that Elon Musk and the other execs said?

**Lauren Grush** (2:29)
Yeah, I feel like the more surprising tidbits really did come during that earnings call. And a lot of very big, bold claims were made about some of the things we might see in the future. For instance, Starship, as you mentioned, he said that Starship would be launching once a day by this time next year. Also, the heat shield for Starship is essentially solved, which is interesting given that there was some skepticism whether the heat shield design actually would hold up and make it a fully reusable and rapidly reusable rocket.
Just a reminder, Starship has launched twice this year on test flights. So to reach a launch a day by next year, that's an exponential increase. So a lot of big claims, we'll see how they hold up, but that's what Elon is known for. I think anyone investing in his company knows that he likes to push the limit and set really big expectations in order to challenge people to meet them.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:27)
What were the other bits that you would pick out having had a night to sleep on it? You put the business of space news that are out this morning. With a bit of time to think, what do we need to know?

**Lauren Grush** (3:37)
Sure. There was another moment as well that Starlink would be the majority of the world's internet in the next few years. Again, I'm not sure about that one. I did take notice of Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, talking about Starlink Mobile and how they actually think that they're going to be able to acquire a lot of the customers that the major telecom servicers like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have. That definitely spoke to their ambitions for expanding that service. I think there's a lot of speculation of whether they'll have to bring in ground-based components, terrestrial components, something that she did mention. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility, but I think it's going to take a lot of investment on their end in order to make that happen. And of course, as we've seen, they're not adverse to putting in a lot of capex.

**Ed Ludlow** (4:32)
We're going to go deeper on SpaceX Mobile later in the hour. Thank you very much, Bloomberg's Lauren Grush. Let's stay with SpaceX. Edison Yu, Deutsche Bank head of global space and aerial mobility joins us now. He maintains a buy rating on the stock, but cut the price target from $255 to $235.