SpaceX Reports Earnings Today. Here Are the Key Numbers Investors Should Watch.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp (NASDAQ:SPCX) is set to report its third-quarter earnings after the market closes on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, giving investors another important look under the hood.

SpaceX's ambitions are large, to say the least, and while those ambitions are exciting, making them a reality -- one that actually returns money to shareholders -- is another matter entirely.

With that in mind, here are the key numbers I'll be watching when the results arrive.

SpaceX earnings: Revenue and profitability expectations

While I am more interested in what's happening within each segment, the headline numbers matter too. Let's start there. Wall Street expects SpaceX to report:

• Sales: $12.72 billion
• Earnings: $0.13 per share

I don't expect any major surprises here. Still, I'll be watching whether stronger sales are translating into better profitability, and what management expects for the rest of the year.

The segment numbers will tell us more.

Connectivity: Watch Starlink's average revenue per user

For Starlink, subscriber count matters a lot, so do revenue and operating profit, but I'm especially interested in how much each customer is paying.

Average revenue per user, or ARPU, came in at $66 a month in the second quarter, unchanged from the first quarter but down substantially from $85 a year earlier. Now, that doesn't automatically signal a problem. Lowering prices to attract new users is a common tactic. But there is a limit.

Starlink is critical to the overall growth story of SpaceX. If the company is relying too much on lowering prices (and therefore ARPU) at this point in the game, it could spell trouble in the future and would, to me, indicate there is more of a natural ceiling for Starlink than bulls are counting on.

I don't expect anything dramatic this quarter, but I'll be watching the trend.

Space: Progress toward reliable, reusable launches for Starship

For the space business, I'm most interested in what the company's leadership has to say about Starship.

The next-generation rocket, designed to be reusable and carry much larger payloads into orbit, is central to the company's long-term prospects. Starship has the potential to reshape the economics of the space industry as well as SpaceX internally.

The problem is that its development has been beset with issues. It's certainly come a long way, but there is still a long way to go before the rocket is a reliable, reusable part of its business.

I'll be looking for any updates on the company's timeline and whether leadership appears to be hedging at all or fully confident the program is progressing as expected.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Revenue growth versus capital spending

The AI business is where I'll be paying the most attention to the relationship between growth and spending.

Thanks to a string of major compute contracts with Anthropic, Alphabet, and others, the segment's revenue began taking off last quarter. I expect this to continue.

Image source: Getty Images.

The question is how much SpaceX is paying to deliver the compute and how much more it expects to spend to service all of the contracts.

Last quarter, SpaceX spent a whopping $15.8 billion in AI capital expenditures (capex) and booked $2.6 billion in segment revenue. How these numbers move in relation to each other is critical.

Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.