Ten spokes. The bets that decide whether it all works.

The profit engine: the only profitable SpaceX segment in Q2. AI compute rentals (Google pays about $920M a month from Oct 2026) may rival it on revenue, so watch margins. Q2 (reported Aug 4): 12.0M subscribers, double a year earlier. Connectivity revenue $4.3B, up 66%, with $1.7B operating income, the only SpaceX segment in profit. Average revenue per subscriber fell from $85 to $66 a month. Oct 15-16: Reuters reported, citing two US officials and a Western official, that the order to slow StarShield service for Ukraine's military came from inside the White House; a senior US official said the president made no such request. Nine senators from both parties asked the Defense Department inspector general to investigate (Oct 16). A Ukrainian Defence Ministry source told Reuters terminals work in motion again, but only up to 100 mph (160 km/h); Musk said StarShield limits are set by the US military and ultimately the president. Oct 16: Reliance said it welcomes Starlink competition in India and that Jio's own satellite service also awaits clearance; the government says all three licensees are at broadly the same stage. Oct 15: Bloomberg reported the EU is seeking to fast-track antitrust approval for Project Bromo, an Airbus-Thales-Leonardo satellite venture meant to cut reliance on SpaceX; no filing yet. Oct 14: Starlink went live in Curaçao after the Oct 7 concession. Oct 14: Bharti's Sunil Mittal said OneWeb is still "significantly ahead" of Starlink in India's approval queue. Oct 12: Falcon 9 lofted 27 Starlinks from Vandenberg after a three-week gap; constellation above 11,100 active satellites. Airlines: American (1,030+ jets from early 2027), KLM and Royal Air Maroc. India remains licensed but waiting on security clearance. Delta picked Amazon Leo for 500 planes from 2028.

Good sign

Q3 subscriber adds above Q2's 1.7M, and India clearing security review.

Bad sign

Growth only from price cuts, a formal India block, or more big airlines choosing Amazon.

Oct 12 (reported Oct 15): Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges said SpaceX has to build the equivalent of T-Mobile's 85,000 US antennas first and warned carriers against wholesale deals that help it; DT still plans Starlink phone service in Europe in 2028. Oct 8: SpaceX agreed to buy Grain Management's nationwide 800 MHz spectrum (about $8B cash, per WSJ) and said it wants Starlink Mobile to be a major US carrier. Oct 6: the FCC approved up to 15,000 next-gen direct-to-cell satellites. The $17B EchoStar spectrum is approved, but commercial use waits for final closing, targeted Nov 30, 2027. Today US phone service runs only through T-Mobile. Abroad, partner launches keep coming: Banglalink in Bangladesh (Oct 7, first in South Asia), Beeline in Kazakhstan and CNT in Ecuador (late September). AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile just formed a joint venture to answer it.

Good sign

FCC approval of the Grain deal and a first own-brand plan.

Bad sign

Spectrum sitting unused until 2028, or carriers refusing wholesale deals.

Google pays SpaceX $920M a month for about 110,000 GPUs from October 2026 through June 2029 (SpaceX SEC filing, signed Jun 5). That is about $2.8B a quarter from one customer, starting this month, from the Colossus data centers. Oct 15: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the BG2 podcast that Nvidia now counts SpaceX alongside its cloud-provider customers because it trains, deploys and rents compute; to a clip saying Musk wants 10 GW of compute by end-2027, Musk replied "Maybe more than 10GW." Oct 13–14: Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas called SpaceX's Distributed Inference Cloud the most ignored growth story, tying terrestrial Colossus rentals to a longer orbital/edge compute path. To buy more chips, SpaceX is reportedly in early talks to borrow about $40B for Nvidia chips (FT and Bloomberg, Oct 7); SpaceX has not confirmed and the talks could end without a deal. The open question is profit. In Q2, Starlink made $4.3B revenue and $1.7B operating income. The AI segment made $2.56B revenue and lost money. Starmind is the possible orbital version of this business later.

Good sign

Q4 shows rental revenue near Starlink's, with positive margins, and more outside customers.

Bad sign

Chip spending and debt outrun rental income.

Oct 14: the FAA published a Notice of Intent to prepare a Programmatic EIS for Starbase Starship operations, evaluating up to 456 launches and 912 landings a year versus today's 25/50 authorization; comments due Nov 30 — review, not approval. Sep 28 (Flight 14): first orbit, all 26 Starlink V3 satellites released, controlled splashdown despite an early engine shutdown. Oct 10: Musk said Flight 15 is about 4 to 6 weeks out and will try to catch the ship with the tower. The FAA planning schedule lists Flight 15 no earlier than Nov 8. Ship 42 for Flight 15 went back for more cryogenic testing, and Ship 40, recovered after Flight 13, is back in Texas for inspection (Oct 7-9). Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas says Flight 16 is targeted before year-end (note shared Oct 11). Every other SpaceX bet, from V3 Starlink to Starmind, waits on this.

Good sign

A ship catch on Flight 15, then a reflight.

Bad sign

Long pauses after every problem.

Oct 15: Musk wrote that the Star Mind computer SpaceX is co-engineering with Nvidia "is far better than almost anyone expects and will reach volume production next year," replying to Jensen Huang, who said the two teams are building a new server architecture "that might be super good in space and on Earth." First Starmind satellites are targeted for Q4 2027 (Musk, August); volume production of the computer is not the same as satellites in orbit. Oct 13–14: Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas called SpaceX's Distributed Inference Cloud — terrestrial data centers plus orbital/edge nodes — the growth story investors are largely ignoring; Starmind is the orbital piece. SpaceX's Starmind design: up to 250 kW peak per satellite, with production of thousands as soon as late 2027. A target, not hardware in orbit. Google is already flying: on Oct 1 its Project Suncatcher prototype put four TPUs in orbit on a SpaceX rideshare, built with Planet, and Google confirmed it is operating as expected. Two more Google satellites with laser links come in 2027. The prototype runs its chips about 15 minutes at a time before cooling, and Google's research chief compared the timeline to 15 years of research (Fortune, Oct 10). Blue Origin has filed for a 51,600-satellite network, Project Sunrise. Google's own paper says orbit beats the ground only once launch costs fall under $200/kg, around the mid-2030s. That cost is what Starship is meant to deliver.

Good sign

Google publishing good chip data (a validator), or booking Starship rides (a customer).

Bad sign

Google proving the idea first and keeping the hardware in-house.

Oct 15: Nvidia's Jensen Huang said Grok Bot consumption "is really skyrocketing," and Musk said he has never seen anything grow as fast, with no free tier. Amazon is blocking Grok Bot orders as an "unauthorized AI agent"; Musk told users to shop elsewhere, floated an Amazon competitor, and said SpaceX will make users whole for Grok Bot purchase mistakes (a post on X, not a change to published terms). Oct 14: SpaceX Super Intelligence launched Grok Voice 3.0 — #1 on Artificial Analysis's Speech-to-Speech Index at 86.9. Starlink uses it for ~20,000 weekday support/sales calls (~70% resolved without a human; ~1 in 4 English sales calls convert). Tesla cars run millions of Grok Voice conversations a day; API price stays $0.08/min. Oct 12: The X Subscription bundles Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium (Free through Ultra at $200/mo). Conversion and churn numbers are not public yet. Earlier: the AI division's X account became SpaceX Super Intelligence (@SpaceXSI) on Oct 10. X ads were $1.8B in 2025, below Twitter's roughly $4B in 2021, and $367M in Q2 2026. X and Grok had 6.3M paying subscribers (May). Oct 10-11: Tesla switched Grok Bot on in every Cybercab and Model Y robotaxi. X Money is live for US Premium subscribers, reported in 41 states (since Jul 27).

Good sign

Paid subscribers and ad revenue both rising after the unified plan, with clear conversion from legacy stacks.

Bad sign

Flat ads, with subscriptions and X Money too small to matter, or users sticking on old plans.

Oct 7: Musk said Tesla and SpaceX will build and run Terafab themselves, with no operating role for TSMC. Intel remains the named process partner. Oct 10: Musk said logic, memory, packaging and masks will sit in one building at Giga Texas, aiming for about 10 chip designs a year. Oct 15: Barclays analyst Dan Levy named Terafab a driver of a possible Tesla-SpaceX merger, citing a $3B Austin research facility and a production plant estimated at about $16.8B, and Musk's remark that separate board approvals could take "a while"; no deal has been announced. Nothing produced yet.

Good sign

A signed partner deal and a first chip out of the building.

Bad sign

Years of plans with no output.

Robotaxi is moving. Oct 15: Electrek, reading NHTSA crash filings, counted five Robotaxi crashes where a remote operator was driving (two new, from August in Dallas and Austin), all low-speed and property-damage-only; Tesla has 36 Robotaxi incident reports on file and does not disclose how often remote operators take over. Oct 14–15: Texas DMV records show 349 Cybercabs registered (+30 overnight from 319), with Model Y robotaxis still at 420, for 769 autonomous vehicles on the Texas list (Texas AV Tracker / TxDMV). Tesla said Oct 10 that 300+ Cybercabs serve Austin (8x in 30 days) and AI software head Ashok Elluswamy wrote "Dallas soon." Oct 12: a production Cybercab from the US fleet went on display at the Paris Motor Show with Optimus and free FSD (Supervised) rides; no European Cybercab service is planned yet. Oct 12–13: FSD v14.3.12 began a wide release; notes say the model is now unified across Actually Smart Summon, FSD and Robotaxi. Oct 13 evening: Tesla said FSD Supervised v14 Lite is rolling out to Intel Model S and Model X. Europe: the supervised software, renamed Tesla Assisted Driving, faces an EU vote in December at the earliest. Ride counts and a Dallas date are still unpublished.

Good sign

Dallas launch, published ride numbers.

Bad sign

Safety monitors back in, or expansion stalls in Austin.

Oct 12: Optimus Gen 2 is on the Tesla stand at the Paris Motor Show in a glass case, next to a production Cybercab. Output reportedly rose to a few hundred a week, but the hand is still largely hand-assembled and Musk called it "shockingly difficult" (Oct 10). Reported Oct 14: All Things Elon says Optimus units are doing live Model Y line tasks at Giga Texas (sorting cells, moving parts); not confirmed in a Tesla IR release. Still not robots on paid shifts outside Tesla.

Good sign

Optimus doing real shifts, a hand built on a production line.

Bad sign

Optimus stuck in demos.

Q3: 486,532 deliveries, above estimates. Storage missed: 13.7 GWh deployed vs about 15.9 GWh expected (Oct 2). Semi: Pilot and Tesla opened the first truck-stop Megachargers in Ellabell, Georgia (Oct 8) and Tulare, California (Oct 9). Oct 15: Tesla revealed the new Roadster at a SpaceX site in McGregor, Texas: SpaceX cold-gas thrusters, 0-60 mph in 0.81 seconds, top speed over 230 mph, range over 300 miles, production in 2028, no price ($50,000 deposit for Performance, $250,000 for Thrust). Oct 15: the WSJ reported energy and charging VP Mike Snyder stepped down, succeeded by AJ Booth. Taiwan's Apollo Power disclosed an Oct 8 order for 260 Megapack 2XL units (about 1 GWh), deliveries from late 2027. Q3 margins Oct 21. Tesla lined up $30B of credit (Sep 29) and says it does not plan to draw it this year.

Good sign

Strong margins on Oct 21 and storage back above its record.

Bad sign

A miss big enough to squeeze the other bets.

Achieved

A bet that hit its goal, with the date and source.

None yet.

Retired

A bet dropped or failed, with the reason.

None yet.