• Elon Musk said AI rivals are clamoring to rent SpaceX's compute.
• SpaceX plans to split compute between its internal uses and outside customers.
• The company could rent out its compute "several times over if we said yes to everyone," Musk said.

SpaceX's AI rivals are clamoring to rent computing power from the artificial intelligence and rocket company, CEO Elon Musk said.

"We are also, frankly, hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler and by dozens of smaller companies to rent more of our compute," Musk said during SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call Tuesday.

Musk said SpaceX could rent out the company's compute "several times over if we said yes to everyone."

SpaceX, however, is reserving a chunk of that capacity for its own AI ambitions, including scaling its AI chatbot Grok and Cursor, the coding startup it recently acquired.

Musk said SpaceX is seeking to devote roughly half of its compute to internal uses and rent out the other half to third parties. That balance could change month to month, he said.

"It's going to be dynamic," said Musk. "And obviously, our approach is to rent at the — effectively the spot market rate as opposed to sign these long-term deals."

The company expects the value of compute to increase as AI models improve and ultimately generate "more useful intelligence per watt," said Musk.

"And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt," Musk said, adding that rental rates for older Nvidia H100 chips have climbed from when they were new.

"I think that's likely to continue," said Musk. "I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time."

Musk likened the situation to Monty Python's famed cheese shop sketch, in which a customer repeatedly asks for different cheeses only to find that none are available.

"We've actually tried to offload some of our inference compute to other cloud providers so that we can use more compute for training," the CEO said. "And we get the cheese shop sketch."

• Elon Musk says it's "no longer impossible" that SpaceX will generate $1 trillion of revenue in 2028.
• The SpaceX CEO said in August that his company projected that much revenue for 2030.
• SpaceX would have to grow its revenue 53-fold in three years to reach Musk's new figure.

Elon Musk always shoots for the moon, but he's aiming even higher with his latest suggestion.

"As crazy as this sounds, $1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible," the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said in a Tuesday post on X.

That's an even more ambitious timeframe than Musk has previously given. He said in August that SpaceX was internally projecting $1 trillion of revenue in 2030, and there was a "non-zero" chance it could reach that amount in 2029.

Musk made his latest pronouncement within hours of saying on SpaceX's third-quarter earnings webcast that annual recurring revenue could reach between $500 billion and $1 trillion by the end of 2027.

In a post-earnings note, JPMorgan forecast SpaceX would generate $254 billion of revenue in 2027.

If SpaceX were to generate $1 trillion in revenue in 2028, that would represent a 53-fold increase in three years. It earned just under $19 billion in 2025. It shared its historical financials prior to going public this summer.

After the bell on Tuesday, SpaceX — the company behind Falcon rockets, Starlink satellites, X, and AI chatbot Grok — posted close to $15 billion in revenue last quarter, up 161% from the same period of 2025.

The key driver was its super-intelligence division, where revenue surged 830%, from around $800 million to $7.6 billion. SpaceX attributed the growth to new cloud services agreements, around $600 million of revenue from its recent Cursor acquisition, and increased Grok adoption by enterprises.

To put Musk's $1 trillion revenue figure in context, Amazon and Walmart, the two highest-revenue companies on the planet, both generated a little over $700 billion in net sales last financial year.

Musk is floating the possibility that SpaceX could generate more than 40% more revenue than either of them did last year, in about two years' time.

It's unclear whether Musk is including Tesla, which generated about $95 billion of revenue last year, in his newest revenue figure. He revealed on Tuesday that Tesla and SpaceX have formed committees to explore a potential merger.

Susannah Streeter, Wealth Club's chief investment strategist, told Business Insider by email that a tie-up could "combine expertise in AI, chips, robotics and connectivity."

But she added that "bringing two enormous businesses with very different operations and capital demands under one roof would be a hugely complex undertaking."

Streeter said that notching $1 trillion in annual revenue in 2028 would be a "very tall order" and require an "extraordinary leap in the scale of the business."

"Moving the goalposts from 2030 to 2028 suggests he is increasingly confident that several growth drivers could accelerate at once, but there is a difference between a target that is technically possible and one that is commercially realistic," she added.

Neil Wilson, UK investor strategist at Saxo Bank, told BI by email that Musk's latest revenue figure is "pushing it" and "would imply such an enormous pull-forward in demand as to defy credibility."

Wilson added that he'd "never say never" about SpaceX hitting $1 trillion of revenue, "but by 2028 I'd say the chance is zero, whatever Elon says!"

• It was lights, camera, and action for SpaceX's second earnings call as a public company.
• SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call included a live video stream of its top execs.
• CEO Elon Musk used video to share dramatic shots of Starship.

SpaceX's superfans may have found their next must-see TV.

The rocket and AI company's third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday included a live video stream featuring SpaceX's big three: CEO Elon Musk, COO Gwynne Shotwell, and CFO Bret Johnson.

The video, which opened with cinematic shots of SpaceX's products, featured the executives seated at a table speaking to the camera from the SpaceX Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas, with SpaceX-branded water bottles in front of them.

"In order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness," Musk said in a recording that played over images of space and the moon, with the result looking far more like a trailer for a sci-fi film than the start of a corporate earnings report.

Musk wore a black T-shirt featuring a logo for Grok, SpaceX's AI assistant, and a black leather jacket, a classic sartorial choice famously favored by another Big Tech CEO.

SpaceX also used the video format to share a recap video of a recent Starship flight as well as a dramatic video simulation, complete with orchestral music, of an upcoming flight in which the company's giant mechanical arms and stand will try to catch both the booster and the ship, calling it a "profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness."

While earnings calls generally include live audio, live video streams are far less common. SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company in August did not include video. Netflix, Duolingo, and Robinhood have all livestreamed their earnings calls.

Netflix has streamed live video of its earnings calls for years, including its latest call on Tuesday, which featured its co-CEOs. Robinhood's CEO told The Verge last year the company's video earnings call was inspired by the NBA post-game interview.

SpaceX reported a significant increase in both AI spending and revenue. The stock was up 5% in after-hours trading.

• Netflix has been talking about its plans to build a video game business for years.
• More recently, it has told investors it was also excited about its move into podcasts.
• Now it has nothing to say about either category. Its silence may be telling.

For years, Netflix has been telling investors how excited it is about its move into video games.

More recently, it has also started talking up its move into podcasts.

But when the company released its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, the streamer had nothing to say about either foray.

What does that mean? Netflix won't say. But I'm pretty comfortable coming up with my own conclusion: Netflix doesn't think games or podcasts are going to do much for its business, at least in the near future.

That also tracks with new reporting from The Wall Street Journal, which says that Netflix has recently "stopped pushing games and podcasts, focusing more on its core movie and TV offerings."

That's logical, given the most pressing problem the company has: figuring out how to make movies and TV shows that attract new subscribers, and that get its existing subscribers to spend more time on the service.

But it's also a real turnaround, at least in its messaging.

Netflix has consistently talked up games since it launched that business in 2021. In 2022, cofounder Reed Hastings predicted that Netflix would eventually "be a big leader in games." And the company has frequently pointed out its ambitions in its quarterly updates to investors.

Last quarter, for instance, the company highlighted a new World Cup game, and an app for kids games, and said it had "increasing confidence that we are building a foundation with exciting future growth potential."

It has also spent the last two quarters talking up its move into podcasts. In April, it said podcasts were a "potential incremental engagement opportunity." Three months later, it told investors that podcasts were good because they gave viewers more reasons to watch the service during the day (as opposed to the evening, where half of its viewing happens) and on mobile phones.

But on Tuesday, it had nothing to say about either category, other than a single legalese mention about forward-looking statements. But it did make a reference to other people's video games: It said a 27-minute trailer for Take-Two's highly anticipated "Grand Theft Auto VI," which it showed exclusively for a six-hour window, had been a hit.

Both games and podcasts make a certain kind of sense for Netflix, in theory: The company has often talked about the fact that gaming is a big competitor for its viewers' time. So why not try to harvest some of that attention for itself? And video podcasts are really just another term for "talk shows on a budget" — so why not offer those up to viewers as well?

The flip side: It's been hard to understand how Netflix would be able to create games that are better or more popular than everyone else in the game business. And it's an open question whether viewers who turn to Netflix in search of distracting entertainment would be interested in low-fi chats.

Maybe both categories eventually turn into something meaningful for Netflix one day. But the company seems to be saying that won't happen anytime soon.