It is always a happy occasion when a newly listed company reports its quarterly earnings for the first time, and they beat analysts’ expectations. SpaceX did that on Tuesday. But if ever there were a case to be made that quarterly financial statements are pointless — a view proposed by the US market regulator — Elon Musk’s rocket maker surely strengthens it.
SpaceX did better than analysts expected on most of the measurements that matter. Revenue increased by 92 per cent year on year; losses narrowed, mostly because of its profitable satellite communications business, Starlink. This is somewhat face saving for Musk, after the 44 per cent fall in SpaceX shares from their peak in June.
What has happened to SpaceX’s finances over the past three months is, though, pretty much irrelevant. The company’s long-term goals, after all, include colonising Mars, asteroid mining and building a “mass accelerator” — a kind of giant magnetic catapult — on the Moon. Right now, its income is derived from selling broadband and renting data centres, activities that accounted for just 14 per cent of the “total addressable market” Musk sketched out in SpaceX’s prospectus.