In an earnings call with Wall Street investors Tuesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and his top executives discussed the growth and financial performance of the publicly traded company’s rocket, satellite and AI divisions.

They didn’t mention any plans for a new spaceport in coastal Vermilion Parish.

As previously reported, Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration is in the with SpaceX to build a launch facility on a 130,000-acre site near Pecan Island about 45 miles southwest of Lafayette.

Landry is expected to announce the deal, which will bring thousands of jobs and commercial infrastructure to the remote area, later this month.

On Tuesday’s call, Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell alluded to the company’s plans to exponentially scale up the number of reusable Starship rockets it will blast into space carrying Starlink satellites.

Eventually, Musk said, Starship payloads will also include components for AI data centers in space.

“I know this sounds nuts … we are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon,” he said. “We’re going to build factories on the moon.”

But he did not elaborate on what it will take to build enough new launch facilities and increase capacity at existing facilities in Boca Chica, Texas and Cape Canaveral, Florida to attain those goals.

None of the Wall Street analysts that were allowed to ask questions following the company’s presentation pressed for details on the topic, focusing instead on the company's financial performance.

In a request for comment last weekend on the Vermilion Parish deal, a SpaceX spokesperson referred to a previous post from May on its platform X. “We are constantly exploring to find viable sites to expand Starship operations in the future, both domestically and internationally,” the company said in its social media post. 

The first call 

Tuesday’s call was the first since SpaceX went public in June with an Initial Public Offering that raised a record-breaking $85.7 billion. In the months since, the company's share price has tumbled from its mid-June high of $172 a share to $125 when the markets closed Tuesday. 

The company reported Tuesday that it brought in $7.8 billion in revenue in the second quarter, up 92% from the same period a year ago. But during the same period, the company remained unprofitable, losing $541 million on the heels of a $4.3 billion loss in the first quarter. 

Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnson told investors the vast majority of the company's capital expenditures has been on its AI division, not its rockets. 

Of $18.4 billion spent in the second quarter on capital projects, $15 billion went to AI infrastructure.

"We plan to invest aggressively in the three areas: Starship (rocket) development and production, Starlink (satellites), and AI compute infrastructure," Johnson said.

Email Stephanie Riegel at stephanie.riegel@theadvocate.com.

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