Elon Musk repeatedly one-upped his execs on SpaceX’s first earnings call

Elon Musk spent SpaceX’s first earnings call making some out-of-this-world claims about the company’s business and future prospects, while his fellow executives kept trying to bring his ideas closer to Earth — providing a hint of what’s to come now that his rocket-launching, compute-leasing, satellite-based telecom is public.

The conference call, held Tuesday, was the latest in a years-long succession of Musk making outrageous promises that his executives then have to make more digestible for the investing public — like at Tesla, where a recent analysis by TechCrunch showed that the world’s richest man is increasingly focused on futuristic topics while his colleagues spend their time talking about the actual business of selling cars.

Let’s start with one of the biggest ideas Musk floated on the call: that he expects SpaceX’s Starlink service to “deliver a majority of the world’s internet” in “less than 10 years.” Musk made the comment in the context of SpaceX preparing to launch the first “V3” versions of its Starlink satellites, which have much higher bandwidth than previous versions.

Here’s what he said:

It’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but like, it’s not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where we’re allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries. So this is, you know, important to bear in mind, and it’s not in like the infinity future. It’s, you know, less than 10 years.

Contrast that with what chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said just a few minutes later, emphasis mine:

The significant amount of capacity we’re able to add to the Starlink constellation from the V3 satellites will enable us to continue providing even better service — and it’s pretty great already — but to do so while serving more and more customers over the world. In fact, in the years ahead, we expect Starlink will represent a significant portion of global internet traffic, which Elon also talked about.

It’s a far more lawyered-up claim to make, even though it’s still obviously ambitious.

But that was not the only instance where Musk optimistically diverged. At one point, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen offered investors one of the few new financial targets discussed on the call. Johnsen was highlighting SpaceX’s relatively new business of renting out compute power to other AI players, which has helped the company generate billions in fresh, fast cash.

I’ll once again emphasize the big promise Johnsen made during his prepared remarks, and note how carefully he phrased it. It’s a very hedged and quite specific claim that he’s making. It’s clearly meant to excite investors while also leaving room for the company to avoid legal exposure if it misses the projection:

Looking ahead, we continue to see robust demand in all three of our business segments, but in particular in our cloud services arrangements. We see increasingly favorable economics with each agreement we sign, and as Elon mentioned, we expect the supply-demand imbalance in the compute market to continue. The current economics have translated into a less than one-year payback on our new capital deployments for compute. For example, in the first few weeks of the third quarter, we’ve already contracted an additional $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue over a six-month period that begins ramping starting in October of this year. We believe this puts us on a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate by the end of this year, based on our expected revenue in the month of December of this year.

Musk, 20 minutes later, bulldozed that carefully constructed statement before immediately inflating it:

To be clear, the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That’s… that’s what we would achieve if we basically did nothing. So like, you know, I think it may be higher than that. It probably will be higher than that.

Musk also riffed on another major prediction about overall revenue on the call, pumping up a goal that SpaceX laid out just two months ago in its IPO documents:

It’s probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching a trillion dollars in revenue, not ARR, but revenue, have moved up from 2031 to 2030. So prior to the IPO, the financial projections we had were reaching a trillion dollars in revenue in 2031. We now expect that to be in 2030. And there’s a non-zero chance of that being in 2029.

The pattern kept repeating throughout the call. A shareholder question about progress on the “human landing system” that SpaceX is developing for NASA’s Artemis moon missions using Starship prompted Musk to all but claim that the prototype rocket will be ready to fly people by the end of next year. He later said SpaceX would be flying Starship rockets once a day, or “possibly more,” by this time next year.

Shotwell immediately followed Musk’s comments about human flight to clarify that SpaceX is still focused on NASA-mandated milestones, and offered a more vague (but still ambitious) goal (again, emphasis mine) that “we want to put boots on the ground, boots on the moon, in 2028.”

None of that will happen unless SpaceX can prove that Starship can fly without failing and, crucially, become fully reusable. A huge part of making it reusable is the heat shield that keeps the Starship upper stage from exploding when it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. The company saw the best results from its improved heat shield on the most recent Starship test flight, which splashed down in the Indian Ocean last month and is still intact. But before the rocket stage had even been recovered, Musk was willing to claim on Tuesday that he’d “consider the heat shield problem solved at this point.”

Musk has made many wild promises about SpaceX that never came true, such as when he said in 2016 that he’d put humans on Mars in six years. The difference now is that SpaceX is a public company, and ostensibly subject to regulation and fines if the company and its executives make promises they know can’t be met.

Of course, the Securities and Exchange Commission has pulled way back on corporate enforcement, especially against public companies. The Department of Justice is doing the same. And if SpaceX can’t follow through on Musk’s wide-eyed claims, investors won’t even be able to do much in civil court — because the company has all but inoculated itself against those kinds of lawsuits by incorporating in Texas.