Elon Daily

Four tags, and why the difference is the whole point

Most coverage of these companies mixes audited figures, company statements, leaked decks, and secondary-market marks into a single paragraph and lets the reader sort it out. An advisor who plans around that mix cannot tell which numbers would survive a deposition. So every figure here is tagged, and the tag is not decorative — it is the load-bearing element.

1. SpaceX — the rocket company is no longer mostly a rocket company

The single most useful thing in the first 10-Q is the segment table. SpaceX reports in three segments: Space (designing, building and flying reusable rockets), Connectivity (the Starlink broadband network), and AI (Grok, X, AI solutions, and computational infrastructure). In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, Space produced $962 million of the company's $7,814 million in revenue. That is 12.3%. Connectivity produced 54.9% and AI produced 32.8%.

Put a sharper point on it: for the six months ended June 30, 2026, Space revenue was $1,581 million against $1,611 million in the same period of 2025 — a decline — while total revenue grew 54%. The launch business did not shrink because anything went wrong with it; it shrank as a share of the whole because two other businesses grew around it. Anyone still valuing this company on launch cadence is valuing an eighth of it.

Consolidated results

All figures Filed — Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended June 30, 2026. Em-dashes indicate a line the Institute did not read for that column, not a zero. Gross profit and gross margin are Institute arithmetic on filed inputs and are labelled as computed.

Revenue by segment

All figures Filed. Enterprise & government revenue includes Starlink Mobile service offerings, per the filing's own footnote. All products revenue is attributable to the Connectivity segment.

Three things in that table deserve to be said out loud. First, Starlink's enterprise and government line more than doubled year over year, from $867 million to $1,806 million in the quarter — growing twice as fast as the consumer line and now approaching half of Connectivity revenue. Second, AI solutions and infrastructure went from $311 million to $2,194 million in a single year, a sevenfold move that is the arrival of a compute-services business rather than the maturation of a model business. Third, and least discussed: X's advertising revenue is still falling. $367 million against $426 million in the quarter; $710 million against $870 million for the half. Inside a segment growing 130%, the advertising line is down 18%. Consolidation does not fix a business, it hides one.

Operating income by segment

Revenue by segment is the easy disclosure and most companies stop there. SpaceX goes further and publishes a full cost build for each segment — cost of revenue, research and development, and selling, general and administrative — down to income from operations. That is unusually generous, and it is the single most useful table this company produces, because it shows that the three businesses are in three completely different financial states.

All figures Furnished — Q2 2026 earnings release, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K. Segment Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure the company defines as segment income or loss from operations before depreciation and amortisation, share-based compensation, restructuring and impairment; it is presented here because the company presents it, not because the Institute endorses it. Three checks were run before publishing: the three segment revenue lines sum to consolidated revenue in all five columns; the three segment operating results sum to the consolidated result in all five columns; and consolidated capital expenditure of $28,476 million for the half ties exactly to purchases of property, plant and equipment in the Filed statement of cash flows. A furnished table that reconciles to a filed one is worth more than a furnished table that does not.

The three segments are running three different companies. Connectivity is the only one making money: a 38.6% operating margin in the quarter, up from 35.7% a year earlier, throwing off $2.6 billion of Adjusted EBITDA against $1.4 billion of capex — self-funding with room to spare. Space is losing more money than it did a year ago and losing it deliberately: revenue grew 29% while research and development grew 55%, to $1,076 million, which is more than the segment's entire revenue. That is a company spending a dollar-and-a-tenth on Starship development for every dollar of rocket revenue it earns. AI made the quarter's most dramatic move — the operating loss halved sequentially, from $2,469 million to $1,257 million, and Segment Adjusted EBITDA crossed into positive territory at $1,146 million from negative $609 million three months earlier. Almost all of that came from one place: $1.6 billion of incremental infrastructure revenue recognised against $14.1 billion of newly signed Cloud Services Agreements. Whether that is an inflection or a pull-forward depends entirely on the shape of those contracts — and the shape is disclosed, in the registration statement rather than the earnings release. It is $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, terminable by either party on ninety days' notice. The terms and what they imply are set out in the data centre schedule in section 5.

Balance sheet

All figures Filed. The related-party total is the Institute's addition of the filed current ($2,039M) and non-current ($11,290M) related-party components at 30 June 2026, and of $455M and $4,052M at 31 December 2025. Equity at 31 December 2025 excludes $38,752 million then classified as redeemable convertible preferred stock in temporary equity; that instrument converted at the IPO, which is most of why book equity moves from $2.6B to $127.2B in six months.

Consolidated statement of cash flows

The income statement says SpaceX lost $4.8 billion in six months. The cash flow statement says something more useful, and something more alarming, and the two facts sit four lines apart. This is the full statement as filed, six months to 30 June, both years.

All figures Filed — Form 10-Q. Every one of the four sections was recomputed line by line and ties to the filed subtotal exactly, in both years. Two notes on presentation. First, the related-party capex line is a disclosure of how much of the $28,476 million went to related parties; it is shown positive because it is a component of the line above, not an additional outflow. Second, the beginning and ending balances are cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash, which is why they exceed the balance-sheet cash figures by $377 million and $830 million respectively — that difference is the restricted portion, and it is a reconciling item, not a discrepancy.

Three further things worth reading twice. First, depreciation and amortisation of $5,290 million now exceeds the entire net loss, and grew 78% year over year — the depreciation charge from the 2025-26 capex wave has barely begun to land, and it will be the dominant force on the income statement for years. Second, the debt was largely refinanced, not raised: $51,812 million issued against $39,396 million repaid, at a cost of $1,545 million of extinguishment loss and $1,153 million of premium actually paid in cash. SpaceX paid roughly $2.7 billion to term out its balance sheet around the IPO. Third, deferred revenue provided $2,169 million of operating cash, more than half the total. That is customers paying in advance — a genuine strength, and also a reminder that this line reverses when growth slows.

The offering

$575 million of costs on $86,250 million of gross proceeds is roughly 0.67% — an extraordinarily low all-in cost of issuance, and itself a data point about the negotiating position of an issuer of this size.

Customer concentration

The filing discloses two customers above 10% of consolidated revenue and names neither of them. Customer A represented 18.3% of revenue in the quarter and 17.9% for the half (19.9% in the first half of 2025), with revenue in all three segments. Customer B represented 19.5% of the quarter and 12.2% of the half, entirely within the AI segment.

Percentages Filed — Form 10-Q concentration note. Implied dollars are the Institute's multiplication against filed consolidated revenue of $7,814 million and are therefore accurate only to the rounding of the filed percentage, roughly plus or minus $4 million. The movement in Customer B is the story. It was below the 10% disclosure threshold in every prior period shown and is now the company's largest single customer, which is what a cloud contract signed in May does to a set of books. Together the two named-only-by-letter customers are 37.8% of consolidated revenue in a single quarter. For the terms attaching to Customer B's likely contract, and why the enforceable portion is far smaller than the reported one, see the data centre schedule in section 5.

Backlog and other filed detail

All figures Filed — Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended June 30, 2026, and the notes thereto — except the final row, which is Furnished. The split matters: the balance-sheet and backlog figures above sit inside an SEC periodic report; the subscriber count sits in an 8-K exhibit. Both are real. Only one carries Section 18 liability.

2. Tesla — revenue up a quarter, operating income down more than half

The headline and the engine room disagree. Tesla's second quarter of 2026 produced revenue of $28,236 million, up 25.5% from $22,496 million a year earlier. Over the same span, income from operations fell from $923 million to $398 million — a 57% decline. Operating margin went from 4.1% to 1.4% while the top line grew a quarter.

Net income to common stockholders was $1,114 million, down 4.9%. The gap between a collapsing operating line and a roughly flat bottom line is closed almost entirely below the operating line: interest income of $422 million and other income of $590 million, against $81 million of interest expense, contributed $931 million to a pre-tax result of $1,329 million. Seventy percent of Tesla's pre-tax income this quarter came from things other than making and selling anything.

All figures Filed — Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended June 30, 2026. One note on the operating expense block: research and development plus selling, general and administrative equal total operating expenses exactly in three of the four columns, but fall $94 million short in the first half of 2025. The filed subtotal is the one printed. The Institute did not read the additional line that accounts for the difference and does not name it here.

Gross profit by line of business

Tesla does not publish a segment cost build the way SpaceX does. It reports two segments — automotive, and energy generation and storage — and it stops at gross profit. But the quarterly update deck furnished as an exhibit to Form 8-K breaks revenue and cost of revenue into matched pairs, and a matched pair is a gross profit whether or not the company labels it one. The table below is that arithmetic, done here and checked three ways.

Revenue and cost of revenue Furnished — Q2 2026 update, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K. Gross profit and margin columns are the Institute's subtraction and division, not printed figures. Three checks were run: the three total-line gross profits ($3,463 + $640 + $648) sum to $4,751 million, which is the Filed consolidated gross profit in the Form 10-Q above; the derived automotive margin of 16.9% matches the GAAP automotive gross margin the company states in its own highlights; and the derived services gross profit of $648 million matches the record figure the company names in the same document. Regulatory credits are a separate line on the face of the income statement, not a component of automotive sales: $20,006 + $146 + $364 = $20,516 million. They carry no cost of revenue, which is why the margin column reads 100%.

All figures Filed. Weighted average basic shares for the quarter were 3,237 million and diluted 3,540 million; the 3,949 million figure is the period-end count from the balance sheet, which is the correct denominator for an ownership-percentage calculation and the wrong one for earnings per share.

Consolidated statement of cash flows

All figures Filed — Form 10-Q. All four sections were recomputed line by line and tie to the filed subtotals exactly in both years. The net income line is $1,619 million, not the $1,591 million attributable to common stockholders shown in the income statement above; the $28 million difference is income attributable to noncontrolling and redeemable noncontrolling interests, which is cash inside the consolidated group and therefore belongs at the top of this statement. Beginning and ending balances include restricted cash of $1,103 million and $1,206 million respectively, which is why they exceed the balance-sheet cash figures. Non-cash items disclosed separately: $2,633 million of property and equipment still sitting in liabilities and accrued expenses at period end, against $1,639 million a year earlier.

Two lines here are new and neither is small. Tesla bought $2,002 million of SpaceX equity during the half and marked it up by $1,005 million — a 50% unrealised gain on a position it acquired in the same six months, recognised in earnings and then backed out of operating cash as a non-cash item. That $1,005 million is a fifth of Tesla's entire pre-tax income for the half. It is a mark on a related-party position in a company controlled by the same person, and it is the single item on Tesla's statements a governance-minded reader should look at hardest. Separately, share-based compensation of $2,181 million grew 81% and is now more than the company's entire net income — a real economic cost that never touches the cash flow statement as an outflow.

5. The physical plant — what is actually being built, and how fast

Financial statements measure a company in dollars, which is the right unit for a lender and the wrong unit for understanding what these two companies are. The comparison that gets made is to Henry J. Kaiser — the industrialist who took shipbuilding from a craft that produced a vessel in eight months to a process that produced one in a matter of days, not by inventing a better ship but by rebuilding the method of building. The claim implicit in that comparison is about rate: not what a company owns, but how quickly it can bring new productive capacity into existence.

That claim is testable. Both registrants disclose installed capacity, and both disclose the throughput they actually achieved against it. This panel puts the two numbers next to each other, because a nameplate figure with no utilisation figure beside it is marketing, and a utilisation figure with no nameplate beside it is noise.

Tesla — installed annual manufacturing capacity

All figures Furnished — Q2 2026 update, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, "Installed Annual Manufacturing Capacity". The two subtotals are the Institute's addition of the stated lines and inherit the company's "greater than" qualifier; they exclude every site marked Commissioning, Construction or Design development, because those have no stated capacity. Status labels are the company's own vocabulary and they are load-bearing: Production, Commissioning, Construction and Design development describe four different distances from a saleable unit, and only the first is generating revenue.

Tesla — supporting infrastructure

All figures Furnished — same exhibit, "Supporting Infrastructure". The company states in the same document that it "more than doubled" its onsite compute in Texas, measured in megawatts, during the first half of 2026.

What the plant actually produced

Achieved figures Furnished. The "against nameplate" column is the Institute's arithmetic: the quarterly figure multiplied by four and divided by the stated annual capacity above. It is a rough measure and should be read as one — a single quarter annualised is not a run rate, deliveries can exceed production out of inventory, and storage deployed is not the same thing as storage manufactured. It is printed because a capacity table without it invites the reader to treat nameplate as output, which is the most common error made about this company in both directions.

SpaceX — compute, orbit and where the capital actually went

Compute, launch and subscriber figures Furnished — Q2 2026 earnings release. Average mass per launch is the Institute's division. See the warning on the SpaceX panel regarding a typographical error in the release's own description of the 0.4 GW figure.

Dollar figures Filed — Form 10-Q. Share column is the Institute's division; components sum to the filed gross total. Construction in progress is described in the filing as primarily AI infrastructure, which means the compute share of this balance sheet is understated by the table, not overstated. Share percentages are rounded independently and sum to 100.2%; the dollar components sum to the filed total exactly.

The data centre schedule — every site the filings actually name

Until this revision the page reported the AI build as a dollar figure and a capacity figure and never once said where. That was a real gap, and it turns out to be closeable. The registration statement SpaceX filed for its June 2026 listing names its data centres, places them by road and by state, and gives the build times — which means facility-level detail on this company is Filed, not merely reported, and belongs on this page at the top rung. What follows is every facility named in a document SpaceX has filed with the Commission, and then, kept deliberately separate, the sites that appear only in press coverage and county records. The line between the two tables is the entire purpose of this page.

All three rows Filed — final prospectus, Form 424(b)(4), added to the sources table in section 7. Two of these facts are worth holding onto. First, the 1.0 GW in the prospectus and the 1.0 GW in the Q1 2026 column of the earnings release are the same number arrived at independently, one on the Filed rung and one on the Furnished rung, for the same period. That is the strongest form of corroboration available without an audit. Second, the filing supplies its own benchmark for the build times: it states that an industry benchmark to bring a 100 megawatt greenfield data centre online is approximately two years. COLOSSUS II's first cluster took 91 days. The comparison is the company's own and is presented as such.

All five rows Reported — press coverage and state permitting records, not filings. They are shown because a reader deciding what to believe is better served by seeing the reported layer than by having it silently withheld, and worse served by having it presented at the same weight as the prospectus. None of these figures is used anywhere else on this page, and none feeds any calculation.

What the money actually bought, six months of it

Both dollar columns Filed — Form 10-Q, property, plant and equipment note. Change and growth columns are the Institute's arithmetic. Four checks were run: the nine components sum to the filed gross total in both columns; the two subtotals sum to the filed gross total in both columns; each change equals the difference of the two filed balances; and the total change of $27,768 million equals $83,071 less $55,303. Flight vehicle hardware is the one line that fell, which in a gross-cost schedule means retirement or disposal rather than depreciation.

What a practitioner should take from this panel. The build-at-scale thesis is real but it is not uniform, and the two halves of it are moving in opposite directions. Capital is compounding into compute at a rate that has no obvious precedent in either company's history — $23.6 billion of AI capex at SpaceX in six months, a doubling of Tesla's Texas compute in the same six months. Meanwhile the manufacturing estate at Tesla is running at roughly three-quarters of its own stated nameplate, with four separate product lines sitting in Commissioning, Construction or Design development and therefore contributing nothing, and SpaceX's launch cadence is declining. Both of those are ordinary facts about industrial companies mid-buildout. Neither is a scandal. But an investor holding this thesis should know that what is being built at unprecedented speed today is data centres, and that the vehicle plants and the launch pads — the parts the Kaiser comparison actually invokes — are the parts currently running below their own capacity.