A wave of buy orders hit SpaceX stock on Wednesday, after the aerospace and artificial intelligence group founded by Elon Musk reported its results on Tuesday, October 20.

The shares climbed roughly 8%, to $159.70. On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, the stock had slipped 0.11%, closing at $147.79.

SpaceX stock catches fire on Wall Street over earnings and merger speculation. What Musk said

The stock is not jumping on the numbers alone. It is also responding to what founder and chief executive Elon Musk said on the conference call that followed the release, when he described a merger between SpaceX and Tesla as «a good idea», adding that the boards of both companies have already set up special committees to examine a potential combination of the two Wall Street giants.

A SpaceX-Tesla merger remains a hypothesis for now: no agreement has been reached on the terms of any such deal, and there is no official timetable.

That said, Musk argued that «a merger between the two companies offers a number of advantages, given that we have now essentially entered the superintelligence singularity phase».

The chief executive of both Tesla and SpaceX added that «there would be much to gain from collaborating on superintelligence software development, on chip design, on the Terafab project obviously, on robotics, on moving large volumes of material into orbit through the Starmind constellation, and on connectivity».

Musk cautioned, however, that it would be premature to treat a SpaceX-Tesla merger as a done deal, stressing that the special committees formed by the two companies have not yet agreed on the terms of the transaction — and may never do so.

He also said that Terafab, the chip-manufacturing joint venture between the two companies, should produce its first test chip around May or June of 2027, with the goal of starting large-scale production by the third quarter of 2028. (The two companies announced the $16.8 billion Texas plant in August: see Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX launch the $16.8 billion “Terafab” chip factory.)

The prospect of a merger with Tesla has supercharged SpaceX shares, which went public on June 12 of this year. But the buying is also explained by the striking quarterly numbers.

SpaceX earnings: revenue, profit and guidance all beat forecasts

In the third quarter, SpaceX revenue jumped 161%, beating analyst estimates, thanks to extraordinary growth at its artificial intelligence division, where revenue rose ninefold.

Total SpaceX revenue came in at $14.58 billion, against the $12.72 billion expected, while adjusted earnings per share (EPS) were 45 cents — nearly triple the 13 cents forecast by the consensus of analysts polled by LSEG, the London Stock Exchange Group’s data arm.

Net income was $4.4 billion and operating income came in at $2.8 billion, confirming the profitability of a group that, in the same period of 2025, had posted a net loss of $1.05 billion.

Pay attention, too, to the guidance delivered by chief financial officer Bret Johnsen, who said on the conference call that first-quarter 2027 revenue would land between $33 billion and $37 billion, far above analyst forecasts, which according to LSEG data averaged $22.2 billion.

Johnsen attributed that outlook to «greater visibility into the pipeline of compute capacity contracts over the next six months».

Alongside the AI division, the number of Starlink subscribers is also rising. Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite internet service, which before the group acquired xAI was considered — and still is considered — the company’s core business.

Here too there was growth: Starlink subscribers rose to 13.6 million in the third quarter of 2026, from 12 million in the previous quarter. Revenue from consumer Starlink subscriptions came to $3.12 billion, while revenue from government and enterprise customers reached $2.13 billion.

Overall, connectivity division revenue jumped 69%, to $5.25 billion, from $3.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, beating the $4.84 billion that StreetAccount analysts had forecast. Operating income at the connectivity division nearly doubled, to $2.37 billion.

A CNBC report noted, meanwhile, that attention is building around Starlink’s plans to build a mobile phone network in the United States.

In early October, SpaceX announced the purchase of 800 MHz of low-band radio spectrum, while the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the US telecommunications regulator, approved the company’s plan for a 15,000-satellite constellation.

The big surprise: the AI division SpaceX now calls Super Intelligence

The biggest surprise was the performance of the artificial intelligence division, which SpaceX now calls «Super Intelligence».

The business brings together the AI operations that came into SpaceX through the xAI acquisition, along with its computing infrastructure and subsequent technology acquisitions.

The unit has become the company’s largest business by revenue, with sales up ninefold to $7.56 billion, from $813 million in the same quarter a year earlier.

Here too estimates were beaten: analysts, according to StreetAccount data, had forecast revenue of $6.47 billion.

During the third quarter, SpaceX also completed the acquisition of Cursor, a startup specializing in AI-powered coding tools, for $60 billion.

Also worth watching is the trend in the launch business, which grew far more modestly, with revenue rising to $1.77 billion from $1.67 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Almost all of SpaceX’s profit, however, still comes from Starlink.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Laura Naka Antonelli on October 21, 2026 as «Azioni SpaceX, esplode la febbre dopo i conti, +8%. Musk su fusione con Tesla: “una buona idea”». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.