SpaceX’s $1 Trillion Revenue Ambition: Can Elon Musk Deliver?

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Jon Quast discuss:

Netflix's slowing growth.Streaming advertising opportunities.SpaceX's AI transformation.Musk's trillion-dollar ambitions.AI infrastructure risks.Tesla-SpaceX merger.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

This podcast was recorded on Oct. 21, 2026.

Travis Hoium: Can SpaceX hit $1 trillion in revenue next year? Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

I'm Travis Hoium I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Jon Quast. Guys, we are going to get to SpaceX. Don't worry, but I do want to start with Netflix.

This is a stock that's been in the Motley Fool Universe for quite a while. A lot of investors probably have a huge winner here, but their recent quarter, not exactly what investors were looking for. Stock's only down about 3% as we're recording early in the day on Wednesday.

But Lou, this seems like one of those quarters with double-digit revenue growth. Their margins, I think, are even a little bit better than they had guided for. But the market's ho hum.

Is this the mature phase that Netflix is now in?

Lou Whiteman: I think that's it exactly. Look, revenue is growing, but it's slower. Not much good news on engagement.

G, people aren't really more excited to come to the Netflix platform. Slowing ad sales, which I think is a really pretty interesting surprise. Look, Netflix is what they are.

I was having this conversation with someone with an investor yesterday about how just it's been a long time since I got excited about anything they found on Netflix. It's a mature company. It's doing fine.

It's like how people are bored with Apple's incrementalism. We are in this age of incrementalism where things that were once wow just aren't as wow. I think a yawn to this quarter, it was a yawn.

Maybe the market's right this time.

Travis Hoium: Jon, decelerating growth, which is always something that investors don't want to hear. They also got rid of their content chief. It seems like they are acknowledging. There's a lot of questions on the conference call about that engagement I don't know exactly what metric you want to use. They wanted to turn it to, you know what? We can raise prices if we want, encouragement must be pretty good. But they are acknowledging that maybe the content isn't as compelling as it needs to be.

Jon Quast: Absolutely. Lou already touched on that. I think that that hits the nail on the head. I don't think that you raise prices when you are struggling with content. I don't think that that is the right move, and I think that's why they're not doing it right now. Nobody punishes a stock usually for the quarter it just reported. Usually, it is the coming quarters that investors are concerned about. That seems to be the case here. You've already touched on a couple of things. I just want to double down on the advertising component. This is supposed to be Netflix's golden goose and probably still is.

But there are already fears bubbling under the surface. Generally speaking, when it comes to digital advertising. Is this something that is going to be disrupted and Netflix then saying, we're actually coming in with our guidance a little bit lighter for the year than we wanted to.

But if I can just put some calm to those fears. If digital advertising is going to persist anywhere in the market as agentic AI takes over, I would say a content business is one place where it's going to persist because that is a place where humans are still interacting with the platform. That's good for Netflix long term.

I'd say, the other thing is, Netflix isn't saying this is a demand issue. This is a product launch timing issue. I would see that this revenue that it was expecting this year, maybe not anymore, it's going to come in just a little bit later than expected.

This is the glass half full outlook.

Travis Hoium: Jon, we're now at the point where shares are trading for under 20 times earnings both on a trailing and a forward basis. We talked about the still double digit revenue growth. Is this a stock that's starting to look compelling?

Jon Quast: I really tried to poke some holes in that idea because as Lou noted, the revenue growth is decelerating and so 16% in 2025, expecting 13% here for 2026, for the full year, the decelerating revenue growth isn't something that you want to see as an investor, but 13%, that's still pretty decent considering the size of the business. You look at the operating margin; it’s expected to be up on a year-over-year basis, maybe a little bit down from an all-time high, but still higher on a year-over-year basis. As you said, that valuation is becoming more attractive.

Maybe fears are overblown in digital advertising. I did try to poke some holes in that idea that maybe this is turning into a good value stock, and I'm having a hard time doing it. Perhaps it is a good value stock here.

Lou Whiteman: It's getting there. I mean, is it a tech company? I don't think it's really a tech company.

It's a media company. Is it a growth story from here? I don't know if it's really.

What are they? If they are an entertainment company, maybe 20 times earnings is about right. I think there's a there.

I don't think they disappear. I think they continue on. But I do think that we need the shareholder base to flip here.

The investors that were in Netflix as a tech growth story are going to have to surrender and get out, and people who would be interested in a mature media company or a streaming company are going to come in. That's going to take time. I don't think as an investor, it's a bad move to look at it now, but I also don't think you have to be in any hurry.

I think, what it's going to be for a while.

Travis Hoium: This is one of those stocks that it's not quite no-brainer territory to me. I've never actually owned shares of Netflix, but it's one that I'm interested in because I think this is one of the companies that is going to survive. But you're right, Lou, you look at the other companies, and they seem to have just a clearer story.

YouTube is clearly the user-generated content company. I think we'll see what the numbers look like in this next quarter, but they're probably growing faster than Netflix. Disney is the family.

You got the theme parks, all of that stuff. Netflix is in a less prominent position than has been for a very, very long time. When we come back, we're going to get to Elon Musk's recent comments on his conference call.

More on that in a moment.

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After the market closed yesterday, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s now, I think, largest holding out of the public companies that he runs. Reported earnings, and the conference call was incredible. We'll get to that in just a moment. But, Jon, the numbers were also incredibly impressive. Revenue was up 161%, positive EBITA. I mean, there seemed to be a lot to like from the headline numbers.

Jon Quast: A lot of that growth coming from, of course, the superintelligence part of the business, and those numbers do need to be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt because there was the acquisition of Cursor; Cursor, of course, estimates have it at a $4 billion annualized run rate before acquisition. Now, is that what is generating quarterly revenue? Absolutely not.

But $7.5 billion for the superintelligence component of the business certainly Cursor was a contributor there. It's not all organic.

That said there is a lot of organic growth here and as you point out, yes, it's so interesting that the actual launch business, what you think of with SpaceX is actually the smallest part of the business by far at this point. Connectivity, that’s the Starlink component of the business, is actually much larger than the launch space business at $5.2 billion for the quarter versus 1.

8 billion for space, but then superintelligence is coming in at over 7.5 billion. This is what this company is now.

Travis Hoium: Lou, I thought SpaceX was going to be a space company when they came public, and it turns out they're really more of a neo clot.

Lou Whiteman: Am I risking treason if I just call it AI and not super intelligence here? I know they renamed.

Travis Hoium: They were really leaning into that.

Lou Whiteman: Yes. But look, this is and it has been. It's a Neo Cloud with a space side hustle. That is what they are. AI is delivering AI, AI is delivering the revenue growth. Star link is generating the profits, so there is a reason for space, but even then, that's a communications company. That's a communications company, by the way, that Elon projects is going to have more revenue in the years to come than T-Mobile does now, which is, I guess, all the optimist robots will have cell phones. Is that the idea?

Jon Quast: Well, that's not too far off Lou, because agentic AI Internet traffic is predicted to surge, and this isn't just something SpaceX is saying. Cloudflare is saying it, too, and Cloudflare is trying to optimize what it does so that it can handle all this increased traffic from agents roaming around the Internet. But no, I don't know sure structures.

Lou Whiteman: Traffic is not the same as revenue per user, though. I doubt that all of these AI bots will have a $50 T-Mobile plan. There's still a weird extrapolation going on. Look, the most interesting part of this, to me, it was in the AI realm. There are two very different bets being made by big companies, and one of them is going to be wrong, it's all coming down to contract length. Elon has said, we think the price of compute is only going to accelerate. They are going for short term contracts with their Nocloud. Amazon is across the way trying to lock it in as high as they can for as long as they can because they don't share that belief.

People like Meta are out there saying, Look, this partially makes sense because we're going to have excess capacity to sell. Other people are saying that. Someone's wrong here. Someone's wrong here. Either SpaceX should be locking it in while they can, or Amazon is going to look foolish, idiotic for not realizing pricing power is only going to come. I don't know who's right here. I think listening to Meta and others say, we're going to have excess capacity makes me biased, but I don't know if anyone knows, but it's really interesting to me that that is a huge just distinction between what some of these companies are doing, and it's going to work out better for one of them than the other.

Travis Hoium: Lou, listen at the conference call, I went through the details. It was interesting that they started with the space stuff and all the cool things they were doing, and then you look at the numbers and go. That's actually, like you said, a side business for them.

But Elon Musk explicitly talked about adding 20 gigawatts, which would be about $500 billion in capex, 500 $1 trillion in capex. Also said they may hit 500 billion, $1 trillion in revenue run by the end of next year, by the end of 2027. That's great growth if it happens.

That is phenomenal growth if it happens. But I wanted to go through some context. If you have not been following Elon Musk and his companies for more than a decade, let's put some context to some of these claims that were made on this conference call.

In 2019, he said that 1 million robotaxis would be on the road by the end of 2020. That obviously didn't happen.

He said that Tesla could produce 20 million vehicles annually by 2030. They never passed 2 million vehicles, said that they would increase revenue 50% annually for the foreseeable future in 2022. They did that in 2022, have not done it since then.

In fact, revenue at Tesla was negative in 2025. You could go all the way back to Solar City. That was when I really started covering the company.

I remember the presentation where they talked about the solar roof and all the promises about the solar roof that never happened. They're not even making the solar roof anymore. Lou, when you look at these comments on these conference calls, I know that he's always made extravagant comments, and directionally, Tesla, SpaceX, all these companies go in the direction that he says, but it seems like we're at a point now where the scale of the investment and the value of these companies is just orders of magnitude higher than we've ever seen.

It seems like a bigger risk for investors today if this doesn't play out the way that he sees.

Lou Whiteman: Also you're at a higher valuation going in. Even if it all works out, arguably, what's the upside for investors from here?

Travis Hoium: Remember when Tesla came out, it was worth a couple of billion dollars.

Lou Whiteman: Trillion. Here's the defense of it, though, I think, or the bull side of it is, is that we, none of us. None of us know what the AI market's going to look like, whether it's physical AI, exactly what will come from AI. There is a ton of potential there. There's a lot of there there. There is well within reason to say that this technology is enough of a step up that it'll create orders of magnitude to use your phrasing of Elon's favorite words of new economic value. I I don't want to be too dismissive of it, but a lot has to go right from here, period.

Travis Hoium: Jon, what do you think when you hear those huge projections?

Jon Quast: Well, I do want to clarify one thing. Yes, 20 gigawatts was specifically mentioned by Elon Musk, but he really doesn't have a lot of hope that they're actually going to turn that much on. They're actually aiming to turn on 10 gigawatts, half of that.

Where does the 20 gigawatt number come from? Essentially saying, Listen, we are struggling so much to get supply that we're trying to lock up 20 gigawatts of supply so that we can hopefully get enough to turn on 10. I think that that is actually pretty important for our listeners here, we do invest in a lot of hidden companies, a lot of picks-and-shovels play, and we have talked a little bit about maybe companies are over ordering right now trying to secure supply and they don't really have intentions to turn it all on.

Now, that's confirming that direction and specifically mentioning things such as cooling, and there are many players in the cooling space. If I'm investing in some of those companies right now, Vertiv comes to mind, I would be very cautious and very at least incorporating this into my view of the company as I assess risks, is there any potential backlog here that is just a company over ordering should try to turn on far less than what they're ordering for right now. That is one thing to keep in mind. Now, I will say if they turn on 10 gigawatts, that is more than three X what they have turned on right now. Clearly bullish on the demand side, but is that too much too fast?

Travis Hoium: For context, ten gigawatts in total, including all the energy, would be about $500 billion worth of total investment. You've got all the other hyperscalers who are turning on, I think about up to 10 gigawatts each next year as well. A lot of supply coming into the market, we're going to see whether there is enough demand, and at what price?

I think that's the other thing. Sure, there's demand for all of this compute, but is it at $50 a megawatt? Is it at $10 a megawatt?

That's going to determine how profitable these companies are. When we come back, we're going to talk about more SpaceX news, potentially merging with Tesla. You're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

Travis Hoium: Welcome back to the show. When SpaceX came public, I think a lot of people thought that they would eventually merge with Tesla. We may be moving in that direction. Lou, we've got both companies having special committees to look at potentially merging. I'm old enough to remember when the SolarCity deal happened, and it was just wave some numbers around, get some bankers to sign off on it. Is that where we're heading here? This is a done deal. It's just a matter of dotting the I's and crossing the Ts.

Lou Whiteman: I don't know if it's a done deal yet, although I am let me just put it forward. Texla should be the name. Because it combines both.

It talks about where they're based. I think he'll just probably call it X, but I like Texla. But look, there is definitely Elon said that both companies have formed committees, so they are definitely I think the worst-kept secret in the world that they're at least thinking about.

I mean, I'll give you a reason why I think it makes sense, and I'll also give you a reason why I don't know if I believe it's a done deal. I think the biggest reason to do it is that I think, very few investors in Tesla that are investors just because they want to be auto industry investors. I don't think there's a lot of investors in SpaceX that are just like, Well, I'm really interested in rocketry or Neoclouds.

I think that the vast majority of investors in both companies are drawn to Elon Musk's ability to create long term value. That's it, if that matters more than the particulars of a business, and I think Tesla's history as a stock has proven that out, why should there be two competing tickers that basically track Elon's brain? All right?

I think it does make sense to just big picture. Elon is one person. Just let him do what he wants to do under one roof and generate economic value.

The reason why not, and I don't in normal times, I don't know if this is in normal times, but Tesla China is just sitting there. In normal times, there's no way a defense contractor, mind you, SpaceX is a major defense contractor, as the headlines with Ukraine have suggested in recent days. There's no way you can justify that.

I don't think China likes the idea either. China hasn't even improved StarLink. The idea that a major U.

S. defense contractor would have a substantial part of their manufacturing base and operations in a country that is not a firm US ally, just that's crazy pills talk until now. I think there's ways to get around that, and maybe we look the other way.

Maybe they just don't want to be in the auto business anymore. I can actually see a world where the combined company just spins off its automaker. There are ways around it, but that seems to be the real elephant in the room as they're talking about this, more so than shareholder concerns.

What do you think, Jon?

Jon Quost: Well, usually you combine a company because you believe that one plus one equals three. There are cost synergies, maybe you're taking out a competitor and going after rather than competing over a customer base, now you're working together. I don't really see that here for these two companies where it makes a whole lot of sense for shareholders why we would combine the businesses here.

It does seem to be more of a story situation or maybe even a little bit more of a control thing. I mean, if they were to combine, then Elon Musk would own very, very strong, perhaps more than half of the combined entity. That seems to have a little bit more to do here, give him more creative control and to lose point.

If you're investing in either of these companies, maybe you do want Elon Musk to have more controls of the combined entity. That could make a lot of sense. But from an actual business perspective, how this makes either company better.

I don't quite see that, but I would be surprised if it didn't happen.

Lou Whiteman: You're not a big believer in rocket cars?

Jon Quast: That's the synergy, right there.

Jon Quast: Well, see, but they already have that. I guess that's my point. They already were able to borrow that technology from SpaceX as separate companies. I don't see where the benefit comes in.

Travis Hoium: Well see. It seems like it is foretold at this point, just like the Solar City deal that I don't think operationally that worked out the way it planned, but it worked out for shareholders.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows The Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising and disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Lou Whiteman, Jon Quast, and Dan Boyd behind the glass, and Travis Hoium, thanks for listening. We'll see you here tomorrow.