Starlink Funds SpaceX’s AI Bet, Cramer Tells Mad Money

By John Maximus · Published 6 October 2026
Reported from named sources and checked against the publishers linked in this article. Corrections: editorial and corrections policy.

Jim Cramer used the September 28 episode of CNBC’s Mad Money to argue that Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) is becoming a broader technology and infrastructure company, with Starlink, AI computing and Starship as separate possible growth engines. Yahoo Finance wrote up the remarks on October 4 and set them against the company’s second-quarter accounts.

If you use or want Starlink: nothing in these results changes the service. None of the write-ups cited here mentions retail pricing, country availability or licensing, and no price move tied to the quarter appears in any of them; our coverage of Morgan Stanley’s $300 target, where Starlink’s prices stayed unchanged remains the most recent pricing marker. What the numbers do describe is who is paying for the satellite network’s expansion — and on these figures, subscriber revenue is funding a compute business that does not yet cover its own costs.

A note on sourcing

Every quote below is third-hand: Cramer spoke on air, Yahoo Finance and Insider Monkey wrote it up, and this report works from those write-ups. CNBC distributes the broadcast through its Mad Money programme page, but no free transcript of the September 28 episode was available at the time of writing, so the wording has not been checked against the original segment. The financial figures stand on firmer ground than the quotes: both outlets attribute them to SpaceX’s own second-quarter accounts.

Starlink, Connectivity and launch

• Insider Monkey reports Starlink accounted for 55% of second-quarter revenue and grew 66% year on year.
• Yahoo Finance reports the Connectivity segment, which houses the satellite internet business, reached 12 million subscribers in the quarter, with enterprise and government demand lifting segment revenue.
• Connectivity is already generating substantial operating income, Yahoo Finance says.
• Insider Monkey puts the launch backlog — contracted missions not yet flown — at $47.5 billion.

AI and compute

• Yahoo Finance puts quarterly group revenue at $7.81 billion against $18.37 billion of capital expenditure, of which AI accounted for $15.83 billion.
• AI segment revenue was $2.56 billion, up 247% year over year, alongside a $1.26 billion operating loss in that segment.
• $14.1 billion of contracted Cloud Services Agreements — customer commitments to buy future computing capacity — were signed in the quarter.
• Cramer said SpaceX bought a large number of GPUs from NVIDIA and is renting them to Google at an $11 billion a year run rate, with a similar Anthropic deal at a $15 billion run rate starting in October.
• Yahoo Finance values the company at roughly $2 trillion.

Why it matters

Yahoo Finance frames Cramer’s pitch as being about what the newer businesses could become rather than what the company earns now: Connectivity is profitable, the AI segment is not, and Starship and orbital computing still carry execution and commercialisation risk. At that valuation, the outlet says, the gap between those possibilities and current earnings remains substantial.

The two growth rates sit at opposite ends of a maturity curve. Satellite internet grew 66% from a base big enough to fund the group; AI grew 247% from one small enough to lose $1.26 billion in three months. That is the trade Cramer is asking shareholders to accept.

In an earlier September 8 episode covered by Yahoo Finance UK, he called the launch-for-hire division the oldest and most advanced, Starlink “their most lucrative division, at least for now,” and the AI business the part long-term bulls are most excited about. He made the stock the flex pick in his fantasy-football-style portfolio, comparing it to Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson because, he said, both are hard to put in one box.

The GPU rental argument

Cramer’s most specific claim was financial: on the Google and Anthropic arrangements he said the GPU purchase “is already paying off,” and Yahoo Finance reports he put the two deals together at roughly $2.17 billion a month in compute rentals.

He also raised orbital data centres as a longer-term idea, recalling that when Elon Musk first talked about putting a data centre in space “it was a laugh line,” and citing NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang on the potential economics. Yahoo Finance says the concept is no longer purely theoretical but remains far from commercial scale, and that Google has launched a Project Suncatcher prototype satellite to test AI hardware in orbit, which the company has confirmed is operating as expected.

The Starship flight that deployed 26 V3 satellites

Cramer also pointed to the September 28 Starship flight, which reached orbit and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the hardware generation examined in our coverage of Starlink V3 satellites and African regulators. Yahoo Finance reports that one of the six upper-stage Raptor engines, a Raptor Vacuum, shut down prematurely, forcing SpaceX to cut a planned 10-hour mission to about three hours; all 26 satellites were still deployed. The outlet says the cause remains under investigation, and that the shutdown shows the vehicle must still demonstrate consistent reliability before it can support the launch cadence SpaceX envisages — the cadence the satellite network’s growth depends on. We have separately covered the capacity that flight added to the Starlink network.

Losses and lock-ups

The second-quarter loss was $541 million, which Insider Monkey says was an improvement on $1 billion a year earlier. Yahoo Finance UK reports GAAP earnings of -$0.09 a share, ahead of estimates, on revenue it describes as up more than 90% and nearly $1 billion above Wall Street forecasts; Insider Monkey puts the growth rate at 92%.

Cramer warned that a large amount of restricted stock will become eligible to enter the market over the next year, which he said could add to public supply and pressure the shares. The timing is described differently across the reports: on September 8 he said a tranche was unlocking “as early as tomorrow,” while Insider Monkey refers to more lock-ups expiring in December.

Reconciling the valuation numbers

A price-to-sales multiple is a company’s market value divided by its annual revenue — a rough gauge of how much investors are paying for each dollar of sales. Yahoo Finance’s October write-up gives 85.5x; its September piece says the stock trades at roughly 50x to 68x forward sales “according to data from different sources,” and quotes Cramer at about 50 times this year’s sales estimates; Insider Monkey cites 68. The spread is mostly about which sales figure sits in the denominator rather than disagreement about the accounts: a trailing year that includes weaker earlier quarters produces the highest multiple, while forward estimates that assume continued growth produce the lowest. The most usable anchor is arithmetic from the figures above — $2 trillion against the second quarter’s $7.81 billion annualised is about 64 times sales, our own calculation, and it sits inside the quoted range.

Short interest is the share of a company’s freely traded stock that investors have borrowed and sold in a bet the price falls. It is quoted here between about 1.24% and 7.22%, a gap Yahoo Finance attributes to different public-float calculations rather than a different number of shares sold short. The honest reading is therefore one bet, not a range — measured against a float nobody has settled on three months after listing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does SpaceX publish a standalone Starlink revenue figure?

Not in the reports cited here. Starlink appears only inside the Connectivity segment and as a share-of-revenue percentage quoted by Insider Monkey, so a revenue-per-subscriber figure for the satellite internet service cannot be calculated from these filings as relayed.

How much second-quarter capital spending went to something other than AI?

By subtraction from Yahoo Finance’s figures, $2.54 billion of the $18.37 billion total. Insider Monkey’s separate statement that 86% of the quarter’s capex went to AI implies the same split. That remainder covers the satellite network, Starship and the launch business combined.

Does 12 million subscribers tell me anything about capacity where I live?

No. The subscriber count is global and these reports give no regional breakdown. Starlink sells capacity per coverage cell rather than per country, so availability, waitlists and congestion vary by address; the company’s own availability map is the authoritative check for a specific location.

When did SpaceX start trading publicly?

Yahoo Finance reports that SpaceX only became a public company in June. There is therefore no full prior-year run of market data — short interest, multiples or institutional holdings — to compare the current readings against.