Elon Musk's company-wide update to SpaceX employees, published August 11, 2026: the story from the El Segundo warehouse to nearly 11,000 Starlink satellites and a 700th Falcon flight, then the road ahead — Starship, Starshield, and above all AI, whose revenue he says will exceed all other SpaceX revenue within weeks.
Elon Musk
In order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness. So it's been a while since the last company talk and I'll try to do these now every three months after our earnings calls, which is when I'm allowed to talk about things essentially at this point. So we're going to start off just by going through the history of SpaceX from the beginning and, and then to present day. I think once in a while it's good to look at the whole story and then think about what do you want the next chapters to be in the story? What do you want the next book to be in the story? So we started off with a clear mission which is to make life multi planetary, to extend consciousness beyond Earth, to understand the universe. And you can only understand the universe if you go out there and you explore and you see other planets and ultimately other star systems. And I think one of the most inspiring things that one could possibly imagine, one of the most inspiring futures one could imagine is one when we're out there among the stars and perhaps meeting alien civilizations or exploring the ruins of civilizations that lasted a million years but died out 10 million years ago. I think that's when I wake up in the morning and think about what is inspiring. Because we need things in this world that are inspiring. Like life cannot just be about solving one problem after another. There have to be things that make you look forward to the future. And being a space faring civilization I think is the most interesting thing we could possibly do for the future. It is making Star Trek real. You know, it's. Yeah, Well, this is how we started out. Yeah. So I don't know, maybe I should have another mariachi band or something. You know, at this end of your party we're going to have a lot of mariachi vans in order. This, but this, this was all of SpaceX in the beginning. Just a, a small warehouse in El Segundo and then Falcon 1. And we really had no idea at the start of SpaceX how to actually make rockets. And obviously we blew up a rocket three times before finally reaching orbit. It looks almost really cute at this point. And then we went through the long effort of trying to land an orbital booster. It's. So it wasn't easy figuring out how to land an orbital booster and then re fly them. But then we got, we got good at it after a while, Took many attempts from a very talented and dedicated team. And now we've got to the point where we take off and Land and recover a booster every few days. By the way, is the noise behind me a little too loud? Can you guys hear me? Okay? Okay. All right. So I think it's always important to reflect upon the difficulty of achieving things because when we were trying to land the booster, no one really believed that we could succeed. And I was told by so many experts in the aerospace industry that you're not going to succeed in doing this. And even if you do, no one's going to buy a rocket that was, you know, a used rocket essentially, which really makes no sense because airplanes are reflown all the time. And frankly I'd rather be on the thousandth flight of an aircraft than its first flight. So we changed the nomenclature to flight proven booster, which is true. So managed to do Falcon Heavy, which is the most powerful rocket in the world before starship operational at least. Yep. And yeah, it's amazing to think that we've, we've got our 700th flight coming up. So just a huge testament to the incredible work of the Falcon team and the launch team manufacturing team. I was just like, give everyone a hand for doing such an amazing job. See and of course this is plastic. I, I, I fully expected this light to fail, by the way. So that's the car that I was driving around LA for like three years and because I thought, well, it's first lighter Falcon Heavy probably going to fail, but we don't want to put something boring on it like you know, I think Boeing, whatever would put like a concrete block, which is extremely boring. So we put Starman flying around and he's still up there. The car is orbiting between Earth and Mars. So and we'll be up there I think for at least 10 million years. And then of course Dragon, first privately developed spacecraft to talk with the space station and first commercial astronaut. We've now done many asteroid missions. I think it won't be long before we get past 100 astronauts to orbit and back. So Dragon has been an amazing vehicle. So we've flown 78 crew members to date and it's been an epic success. So I'd like to say congrats also to the Dragon team. Excellent work. And then Starlink, it's like, well if you've got a rocket that can fly a lot, what do you fly on it? And so the Starlink team has built from nothing an entire global Internet system. And it's the first high bandwidth global Internet system ever to exist. And I actually think that down the road it'll probably be, I think it'll probably do a majority of the Internet, in fact, I think might end up doing over 90% of all Internet traffic on Starlink. So which is really incredible to think. Almost 11,000 satellites in orbit. That's more than twice as many satellites as everyone else combined. And with the Starlink V3 and beyond, we'll go to 100,000 satellites. So it's really quite remarkable. It's quite difficult to build the Internet in space, like rebuild the entire Internet in space, all of the hardware, all of the software, and yet the team has done it. So huge congrats to the Starlink team. Yep. So we're now in 167 countries, 22 million mobile subscribers, 13 million high bandwidth subscribers, and like I said, expect these numbers to increase by more than a factor of 10 over time and long term. Probably the. In fact, Cloudflare just recently mentioned that based on the current growth, they think probably AI traffic will be a thousand times more than human Internet traffic in five years. Like let that sink in for a minute. You know, it's a lot of AI. And then we've got Star Shield which is, has become a vital part of national security. So there's limited. We can't say too much about Star Shield for obvious reasons because it's, you know, top secret and stuff, but the starshield team has done amazing work and it is now a vital part of America's national security. So congrats. Yeah, Starship is amazing. Wow. Hard to believe that humans made such a thing. I think the future AI will look back and say, not bad for a bunch of humans. So, yeah, so, so it's a Starship is obviously an incredible vehicle and it's what will take us from roughly 2,500 tons to orbit per year to over a million tons to orbit per year. And I think maybe even to 10 million tons per year. These are mind boggling numbers, but I'd say it's highly likely. We do over a million tons a year. Two orbit with Starship and probably close to 10 million, which is mind boggling obviously, but that's the kind of tonnage that you need in order to build a civilization on the Moon, Mars and beyond. If you can't deliver millions of tons to Earth orbit, you can't get the millions of tons that you need to the Moon and Mars to make us a sustainably multi planet species. So it's an incredible vehicle. Like I said, I think it's arguably the hardest thing that humanity has ever tried to do. And the Starship team has done an Amazing job across the board with engines, avionics, structures, launch operations. So big hand for the starship team. So where are things headed in terms of SpaceX AI? The wild thing is that probably our AI revenue, not probably, definitely our AI revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue probably in September, like next month, and will significantly exceed all other SpaceX revenue in the fourth quarter. So it's AI has become an extremely important part of SpaceX's future. I think it's actually vital that we succeed in AI, not just in hardware, but also in software. So, Yeah, the future is fundamentally AI and robots. Assuming, assuming civilization continues to progress, I think that AI will probably, the amount of digital intelligence will probably be more than a trillion times the amount of biological intelligence. So not sort of equal to human intelligence, but probably a trillion times higher. I'd say a billion times is an easy prediction, and probably a trillion. So as you, as you harness more and more of the sun's energy, the ability to turn that into intelligence is fundamentally a digital computer thing, because it's pretty hard for humans to go live in deep space without any support. I mean, some of the math is interesting to think about, which is that if you increase civilizational energy usage, the amount of energy that we have harnessed as a civilization, by a factor of a million, you would still be using much less than one millionth of the sun's energy. Now, most of this is in deep space, obviously, but the future is very much AI, very much. And I suppose there was always going to be that way. But it's important that we have an AI that cares about humanity, that fosters humanity, and helps take us to other planets and other star systems. And this is why I think it's, it's essential that SpaceX succeed not just with AI hardware, but also with AI software. I think an AI that is sort of SpaceX's baby will be a very good AI. I think SpaceX is a collection of some of the very best humans on Earth, both in capability and morality and goodness. And I think we want to have an AI that is born of that, of that capability and that morality and that goodness. I think that's very, very important. So I'd like to encourage people to help out actually with the AI hardware on the ground and the AI software, and of course, with the AI satellites. Solar is going to be a very important part of that. The, the tariff will be a very important part of that. But we must also succeed on the software front, and we're going to be training Grok on the Sum total of all SpaceX information. So in a way it is, it will be trained on you. On, it'll be, yeah, I mean you will effectively be the parents of the AI. It will inherit your thoughts and ideas and beliefs and, and I think that's a, that's a good thing. So yeah, we, we gotta, we gotta win here on this, on the AI hardware and the AI software. That, that maybe is the most important message, I think that is actually the most important message I wanted to convey today is that we must win on AI because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots. So we want, we won't ultimately be able to control the AI. It'll be too smart for that. But, but just like if you have a child that is a super genius child, you can still instill in that child the values and beliefs that you think are good and right. And so that's why it's incredibly important that we succeed with Groq. So. Yeah, well, Grok 4.5, you've tried probably. We've got 4.6 coming out in about a week and then 4.7 should be really pretty special. So I'd like to encourage everyone at SpaceX to use AI and to make it better. We've already built the most powerful AI training clusters in the world. And, and then this is, this, this is what we expect to do by the end of next year is about 10 times more than what we've done thus far. This will be very important practice for space AI. And I do think that AI training will continue to be on the ground, but AI inference, the day to day use of AI will be in space. So we're aiming to get to 10 gigawatts by the end of next year. This is depending on what the value per watt is. If the value per watt is probably going to be 30 to $50, which means if we bring 10 gigawatts of AI online by the end of next year, it will be 300 to $500 billion a year in revenue. Big numbers. And sometimes I wonder what is our purpose? And it could be that our purpose is that the purpose of humanity is to give birth to a star mind, a sentient sun. I don't know what the AI is going to think about, honestly, it's a lot of computer. But I guess this is the next step in the evolution of a civilization is to harness the power of the sun. I mean, there was a physicist called Kardashev who argued that you could consider any given civilization on the basis of whether it has been able to harness most of the power of its planet or most of the power of its sun, almost the power of its galaxy and beyond. So that's what's going to happen and we're going to do it. The factory for Starmind will be located nearby, adjacent to us. Basically. They just come from space. It's amazing. So, But long term, not that far into the Future, probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX. I'd say five years for sure. AI will be 99% the value of SpaceX and the value of SpaceX will be some astronomical number. Sa. It. Sam. Now that's what you call an interesting now that is what you call an interesting future. A very interesting future. It's like Robert Heinlein's moon is a harsh mistress, but mass drivers building AI compute on the moon and saying it into deep space. I'd really like to see that thing in operation. One of the nice benefits of this also is that anyone at SpaceX who wants to go to the moon or Mars will be able to go in the future, you have my word. It'd be pretty fun to have a party on the moon, you know, jumping around, you know, so. Yeah. And incredibly, it will be an incredibly exciting future where we're a space faring civilization and there are people on every part of our solar system and eventually going to other star systems. So I, I think this will happen. So yeah, and you're going to make it happen. So thank you.