SpaceX reported revenue of $7.8 billion for the second quarter, up 92 per cent on the same period a year earlier, in its first earnings report since its June flotation. The figure was ahead of analysts’ average estimate of $6.8 billion.

The company said its net loss for the quarter narrowed to $541 million, from $1 billion a year earlier. Capital expenditure was $18.4 billion, in line with analysts’ average estimates.

Shares in the satellite, rockets and artificial intelligence company were trading down $8.49, or 6.9 per cent, at $116.77 in after-hours trading on Wall Street, valuing the business at $1.7 trillion. SpaceX floated at $135 a share in mid-June.

The stock rose in the first few days after the initial public offering, temporarily making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX has since lost more than $1 trillion in market capitalisation, and in July the shares fell below their $135 float price for the first time, leaving UK retail investors who put £271 million into the offering nursing paper losses.

The shares have come under pressure amid concern about the end of a lock-up on 6 August, when some employees and early investors will be able to sell. Investors have also been seeking more clarity on the AI business and a potential merger with Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company.

Starlink drives growth

Most of SpaceX’s revenue last year came from Starlink, its satellite internet service, and the company’s quarterly results statement shows the division continued to drive growth. Starlink delivered $4.3 billion in the quarter, up 66 per cent year on year.

SpaceX said it reached 12 million subscribers by the end of the second quarter, double the figure a year earlier. It also said it had been awarded more than $6 billion in US government contracts for Starshield, a version of Starlink providing a classified and encrypted signal. Government demand for the technology extends beyond the United States: the Ministry of Defence has spent £16.6 million with Starlink over four years, largely on terminals for Ukrainian forces and British personnel.

The AI business, which includes xAI, the Grok chatbot, the social media platform X and a data centre operation, has been the company’s largest area of investment. AI revenue rose 247 per cent year on year to $2.56 billion, while losses narrowed to $1.3 billion from $1.5 billion.

Space revenue grew 29 per cent year on year to $962 million, while losses in the division widened to $542 million from $369 million. The segment covers commercial launches, government missions and development of Starship. SpaceX said space revenues were supported by a “higher number of large customer launches” compared with a year earlier.

Bret Johnsen, SpaceX’s chief financial officer, said revenue growth “accelerated across all our business segments”.

From rockets to conglomerate

Musk, 55, founded SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, in 2002 as an aerospace manufacturer and space transportation company, with the stated goal of reducing launch costs to enable the colonisation of Mars. He has since built it into the world’s largest rocket business by launching thousands of Starlink satellites and developing reusable rockets.

The group disclosed its finances for the first time in May, reporting revenue of $18.7 billion for 2025 and a net loss of $4.9 billion, ahead of a listing that ranks as the largest in stock market history. Further segment data is published on the SpaceX investor relations site.

Musk has said he plans to build a city on the moon and put data centres in space.

Amy Ingham

Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College’s journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel’s nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.

Some government regulations become outdated. Others become absurd. The FCC’s national television ownership cap has become both. For decades, Washington banned local television broadcast groups from reaching more than 39% of American households. The rule was built for a media world from the last century–a world of limited viewing options, a handful of networks, a captive audience with nowhere else to turn.

That world no longer exists.

Americans now get news, information, and entertainment from countless sources: YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X–and also traditional TV. They consume content from global companies with market caps larger than the GDP of most countries.

And where are those companies headquartered? The coasts, from New York to San Francisco. They don’t care about the middle of this country. They don’t cover it. They don’t reflect it.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr speaks onstage during the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit at the Sheraton New York Times Square in New York City on Sept. 22, 2025. (John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit / Getty Images)

Last month, several national TV networks refused to air President Trump’s primetime address on foreign adversaries meddling in American elections. That’s the media establishment in action, coastal elites deciding what you’re allowed to see.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is fighting back.

The commission recently advanced an order to repeal the national cap, a move that signals it is finally ready to confront one of the most indefensible media rules still on the books.

If Congress proposed capping Netflix at 39% of American households tomorrow, it would be laughed out of the room. But impose the same limit on broadcasters, and Washington’s regulatory class acts like it makes perfect sense.

The national cap is not a free-market policy, a conservative policy, or even a serious competition policy. It is the government picking winners and losers, tying one set of competitors down while everyone else runs free.

That is exactly the kind of government distortion conservatives have spent decades fighting.

The cap’s defenders act like the internet never happened. Their arguments are self-serving and frozen in time. They warn about broadcasters getting too big while shrugging at trillion-dollar Big Tech firms that dominate digital advertising, online video, and the modern flow of information. They fret over local television stations while handing a free pass to companies with global reach and unchecked power.

The media marketplace has changed beyond recognition. The rules governing broadcasters have not.

Carr’s FCC is ready to fix that.

Repealing the cap won’t hand broadcasters a special favor. It will remove a government-imposed handicap. Broadcasters will still compete and have to win viewers, attract advertisers, and produce content people actually want to watch. They will simply do so under rules that reflect modern reality, not assumptions from a dead era.

Modernizing these rules won’t solve every problem facing local television. But it will eliminate a government-made barrier that serves no meaningful public-interest purpose. It will give local broadcasters the ability to push back against coastal elites and deliver the news Americans actually deserve to hear, not what’s filtered through a New York newsroom.

Carr deserves major credit for finally forcing this relic of media policy into the real world.

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Space Exploration Technologies Corp. delivered stronger-than-expected results in its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday, but shares fell sharply in after-hours trading as investors focused on soaring artificial intelligence spending rather than the revenue beat, while CEO Elon Musk used the call to warn that a global memory chip shortage could keep prices elevated for years.

SpaceX, which began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX following its initial public offering in mid-June, reported second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, a 92% increase from a year earlier and well above the market forecast of roughly $6.93 billion. Despite the beat, shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading following the earnings release, extending a decline that has left the stock well below its IPO price in the weeks since the company’s record-setting debut.

Capital Spending Spooks Investors

The market’s negative reaction centered on the scale of SpaceX’s capital expenditures, which reached $18.4 billion for the quarter, roughly a sixfold increase from a year earlier and an 81.7% jump from the $10.1 billion spent in the first quarter. Of that total, $15.8 billion was directed toward the company’s artificial intelligence operations, a division that posted a $1.3 billion net operating loss for the period. SpaceX indicated that spending in the third and fourth quarters would likely remain at similarly elevated levels, a signal that appeared to unsettle investors already weighing questions about the sustainability of the company’s AI ambitions following its record $1.75 trillion valuation at the time of its IPO.

Musk Lays Out a Long-Term Vision

During the call, Musk outlined an ambitious roadmap for the company’s growth, including plans to launch a Starlink mobile service by the end of 2027, build lunar rocket-launch infrastructure by 2028, and reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. He also said the company could not rule out the possibility that Starlink would eventually provide most of the world’s internet access, adding that such a scenario was not something in the very distant future but less than a decade away. Musk further said the company plans to launch its Starship spacecraft at least once a day starting roughly a year from now, positioning the vehicle as a key driver of long-term growth for the space business.

Despite the scope of that vision, investors appeared largely unmoved, with the stock’s decline reflecting continued concern over the pace of AI-related spending and the looming expiration of employee share lockups, set to release as many as 911.5 million additional shares on Aug. 7 according to analysts at Deutsche Bank.

Communications and AI Businesses Drive Growth

Within SpaceX’s results, the communications segment, which includes the Starlink satellite internet service, led revenue growth, rising 66% from a year earlier to $4.29 billion. Starlink subscribers doubled over the past year to reach 12 million, with the service now deployed across 170 markets following the launch of more than 10,000 satellites into low Earth orbit. Revenue from the company’s AI business, which SpaceX has described as a future core operation, surged 250% to $2.56 billion, while the traditional space launch business grew 29% to $962 million.

Musk also addressed the company’s chip strategy directly, stating that SpaceX’s data centers would be built exclusively on Nvidia chips, a comment that sent shares of rival chipmaker AMD lower in after-hours trading even as AMD posted its own strong results the same day.

A Warning on Memory Chip Prices

Perhaps the most closely watched moment of the call came when Musk addressed the global memory chip market, arguing that current supply constraints represent the central bottleneck facing continued AI infrastructure expansion. Musk said memory chip production is increasing by roughly 20% annually, while demand is surging by more than 200%, a gap he said would keep prices climbing rather than falling under basic economic principles, directly rebutting a “memory peak-out” theory that had circulated among some market analysts in recent months.

The comments echoed remarks Musk made during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call last month, when he said memory was currently in short supply and specifically thanked Micron Technology for allocating memory to the company, along with expressions of gratitude toward TSMC and Samsung Electronics. Industry observers noted that Musk’s willingness to name specific suppliers and express public gratitude during an earnings call was unusual, and some analysts suggested it reflected the growing dependence of Musk’s broader business empire on the AI semiconductor supply chain.

Musk’s remarks triggered a swift reaction across memory chip stocks. Micron shares closed up more than 7% following the comments, while American depositary receipts of South Korea’s SK Hynix also advanced in New York trading. Analysts at consulting firm Deloitte have separately forecast that global memory chip sales could exceed $1 trillion in 2027, up sharply from approximately $230 billion in 2025, with memory supply tightness potentially persisting into 2029 or 2030 if hyperscale cloud providers continue expanding their data center investments at current rates.

AMD Posts Its Own AI-Driven Surge

SpaceX’s results arrived alongside a strong earnings report from AMD, which has emerged as a leading rival to Nvidia in the AI chip market. AMD reported second-quarter data center revenue of $6.72 billion, more than double the figure from a year earlier, driven by robust demand tied to AI infrastructure buildouts. The company forecast third-quarter revenue of $13 billion, above the market consensus estimate of $12.52 billion, citing continued growth in demand from large-scale AI data center expansion.

A Broader Signal for the AI Supply Chain

Taken together, the results from SpaceX and AMD reinforced a broader theme among analysts covering the AI infrastructure buildout: that demand for the underlying chips and memory components powering artificial intelligence systems continues to outstrip available supply, even as some individual companies face investor skepticism over the scale and pace of their own capital spending. For SpaceX specifically, the coming quarters are likely to remain a focal point for investors weighing the company’s long-term growth ambitions against the near-term financial strain of its aggressive AI infrastructure investments.

BTS’s decision to withdraw from consideration at the 2027 Grammy Awards has continued to draw reaction from across the music industry in the days since the announcement, with pop star Justin Bieber among the figures who have weighed in publicly as the controversy surrounding the Recording Academy’s new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category shows no sign of fading.

Bieber’s involvement in the ongoing conversation follows his appearance alongside BTS at one of the summer’s most-watched entertainment events. On July 19, Bieber joined Madonna, Shakira, Burna Boy and the seven members of BTS on stage during the halftime show of the FIFA World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a Chris Martin-curated performance that put th

How the Boycott Began

BTS’s decision traces back to July 29, when all seven members, RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook, posted identical statements to their individual Instagram accounts announcing they would not submit any music for consideration at the 69th Grammy Awards, scheduled for Feb. 7, 2027. The group said it hoped music could be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language, and thanked its fanbase, known as ARMY, for their continued support. The statement did not explicitly name a category, but it was widely interpreted as a direct response to the Recording Academy’s June 16 announcement of Best Asian Pop Music Performance, a new award requiring meaningful use of one or more Asian languages that many critics argue effectively walls K-pop and other non-English Asian pop off from the ceremony’s marquee general-field categories.

The withdrawal came at a moment when BTS appeared to have its strongest Grammy prospects in years. The group’s fifth studio album, “Arirang,” released in March following the members’ return from South Korea’s mandatory military service, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and topped charts in 23 countries, while lead single “SWIM” became the group’s highest-charting entry on the Hot 100 to date. BTS had collected five prior Grammy nominations without a win, for “Dynamite,” “Butter,” “My Universe” and its featured role on Coldplay’s “Music of the Spheres,” and had previously described the Grammys as the “last summit” left for the group to climb.

Industry Reaction Continues to Build

Support for BTS’s stance has come from a range of figures inside and outside the K-pop industry in the days since the announcement. Tablo, frontman of the Korean hip-hop group Epik High, publicly backed the decision on social media, as did Maggie Kang, the Korean Canadian director of Netflix’s animated hit “KPop Demon Hunters,” and Mike WiLL Made-It, the American producer behind the “Arirang” track “Aliens,” which surged to No. 1 on iTunes charts in 78 countries following the boycott announcement as fans rallied behind the group.

CedarBough T. Saeji, a K-pop scholar at Pusan National University, has offered a pointed critique of the new category’s design, telling reporters that while some within the Recording Academy likely viewed the addition as inclusive, nothing about categories like Record of the Year or Best Pop Duo/Group Performance needs to exclude music made by non-American artists. Anton Hur, a translator known for his work on a bestselling book about BTS, separately praised the group’s decision on social media, calling it the right call.

The Recording Academy’s Response

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. addressed the boycott directly in a statement, saying he was saddened to hear that BTS had chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, while adding that he understood and respected the group’s decision as a fellow music creator. Mason has since sought to clarify the intent behind the new category, stating that submitting music in a genre category such as Asian Pop, or Jazz, or Country does not exclude an artist from also being considered in the Grammys’ General Field, which includes Record of the Year, Album of the Year and Song of the Year. He said recognition in a genre category and recognition in the General Field are not mutually exclusive, and that an artist can pursue both simultaneously.

That explanation has done little to quiet critics, some of whom point to a pattern across the awards industry of introducing specialized categories for K-pop only after the genre has become too commercially significant to ignore. Since 2020, when BTS became the first Asian act nominated in MTV’s main Video Music Award pop category alongside artists including the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga and Bieber himself, several major award shows including the American Music Awards, MTV Europe Music Awards, iHeartRadio Music Awards and Billboard Music Awards have introduced K-pop-specific categories of their own.

A Boycott With Limits

Despite the wave of public support, BTS’s management company HYBE has clarified that the withdrawal does not represent a company-wide boycott, and that neither the group nor its label has asked other artists to follow suit. That distinction has proven significant: while individual voices across music and entertainment have expressed solidarity with BTS in the weeks since the announcement, no other major K-pop act has formally joined the group in withdrawing music from Grammy consideration, with submissions for the ceremony’s new categories remaining open through Aug. 28.

With BTS out of contention, the inaugural Best Asian Pop Music Performance award will go to another act when nominees are announced in mid-November, with industry observers naming groups including ATEEZ, Stray Kids, Hearts2Hearts, BINI and CORTIS among the likely contenders. As the submission window continues, attention remains focused on whether additional artists, drawing further public commentary from figures across the industry, ultimately follow BTS’s lead or choose instead to compete for a category the K-pop pioneers themselves declined to enter.

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