Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Class A Common Stock

E-mini S&P 500 futures climbed about 0.7% as investors weighed cooler job growth against firmer factory and price signals. The September non-farm payrolls report showed only 29,000 new jobs and unemployment at 4.2%, with annual wage growth at 3%, while the ISM Manufacturing PMI stood at 54.5 and the S&P Global manufacturing gauge at 55.9, both pointing to busy factories and rising costs tied to tariffs and Middle East conflict. Among individual movers, Teradyne jumped 8.00% on upbeat AI data center and HDD supply commentary, Hewlett Packard Enterprise rose 7.36% after analysts raised targets on a bullish networking event and Helios AI order, and Space Exploration Technologies gained 7.35% on Starship cadence, Grok pricing and large AI compute deals. Western Digital fell 10.22% and Seagate Technology Holdings declined 10.21% after Toshiba outlined plans to nearly double AI data center HDD capacity, while Accenture slipped 6.31% as investors locked in gains after a sharp post-earnings rally. On the radar this week are the ISM Services PMI on Monday, Constellation Brands earnings on Tuesday, a Fed Williams speech on Tuesday, FOMC Minutes on Wednesday and Initial Jobless Claims on Thursday.

Global mergers and acquisitions activity slowed sharply in the third quarter from the second, with US deal activity falling by nearly half to $535 billion, according to Mergermarket data. Despite the lull, 2026 remains on pace for a record year in worldwide M&A deals by dollar value, buoyed by megadeals such as SpaceX's $55 billion acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor in June and NextEra Energy's $67 billion merger with Dominion Energy in May. Mergermarket head Lucinda Gutherie said it is natural to have a slowdown as the market digests those transactions, but warned that the reasons not to do a deal have been mounting, citing the Federal Reserve's 25 basis point rate hike, Treasury yields at multidecade highs, calls for a slowdown in the tech industry's artificial intelligence race, and the lengthening toll of the US war in Iran on energy and other prices. UBS analyst Erika Najarian wrote that while some of the investment banking slowdown can be attributed to a long summer, an unhappy bond market implies a deeper freeze in future activity. Deal fee forecasts from Wall Street banks have been mixed, with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan noting a year-over-year drop of at least 10% in overall investment banking fees, JPMorgan projecting growth in the mid-to-high teens, and Citigroup expecting single-digit growth, while Oppenheimer analyst Chris Kotowski said he remains a believer that M&A activity should accelerate. On Tuesday, smart ring maker Oura postponed its planned initial public offering, joining Holtec Nuclear and Bamboo Insurance in citing market conditions for retreating from planned public debuts.

SpaceX shares have stabilized after notching an all-time low of $104.83 in early August, with the company citing fresh catalysts that could drive the stock higher into year-end and into 2027. Starship, SpaceX's two-stage rocket and the largest human-made flying object, recently reached orbit for the first time, and the recent flight deployed the first 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. Anthropic expanded its computing agreements with SpaceX, committing up to $84.5 billion through May 2029 for NVIDIA-based AI infrastructure, while Zacks Consensus Estimates suggest SpaceX will grow revenue by 147% in 2027. The odds of a SpaceX and Tesla merger by the end of next year have spiked to 63% on Polymarket. The company also pointed to Planet Labs and Google's launch of the first AI satellite as proof of concept for its ambitions in space-based AI data centers.

Google said Thursday that its prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher, built in partnership with Planet Labs, launched into orbit aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX. The tech giant said its team has confirmed contact with the satellite, and it is operating as expected. Travis Beals, senior director of Project Suncatcher, wrote in a blog post following the launch that this is the first step in a long-term research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure, and that over the coming weeks the team will gather in-orbit data on how its TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space. Alphabet holds a stake worth more than $82B in SpaceX, which went public in June in a record IPO. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has also announced that it plans to build and launch its orbital data centers.

SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, marking the company's 13th crew rotation mission for NASA. The crew, consisting of two Americans, one Canadian, and one Russian cosmonaut, lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a Falcon 9 rocket. According to Bloomberg space correspondent Lauren Grush, the mission comes amid speculation that SpaceX may retire the Crew Dragon once the ISS program ends, with only four more crew rotation missions currently scheduled. The crew will spend roughly a week aboard the station before the previous Crew 12 team returns to Earth following a handover. Three of the four astronauts on this flight are first-time flyers.

MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said Tuesday that SpaceX's Starlink is becoming a more credible competitor to terrestrial broadband providers, particularly in rural and lower-density markets, as the service begins deploying higher-capacity V3 satellites. Moffett told CNBC that Starlink poses a much greater competitive challenge to Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. than to traditional wireless carriers such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., saying the terrestrial broadband business where they deliver ISP service is a very credible product that already is having a significant impact. SpaceX's first Starship orbital flight deployed 26 V3 Starlink satellites, which Moffett said carry substantially more capacity and should improve the service, though he expects it will be after 2030 before most of the Starlink constellation consists of V3 satellites. Even with V3 satellites, he does not expect Starlink to match the speeds offered by terrestrial fiber or cable broadband, leaving pricing and customer segmentation as major competitive factors, with Starlink potentially competing more effectively for value-oriented customers. Moffett compared the challenge with the pressure Comcast and Charter already face from fixed wireless access, noting the cable operators have responded by bundling broadband with wireless services, a strategy he said has proven relatively successful.

Satlyt, a startup founded by former Google and SpaceX product manager Rama Afullo, has raised an $8 million seed round to build software that runs AI models on satellites. The Sunnyvale, California and Nairobi-based company does not plan to build its own spacecraft, instead positioning itself as a software layer for orbital computing, with Afullo comparing the approach to VMware and Snowflake. Satlyt has already flown its software on two demonstration missions, including a deployment of Google DeepMind's Gemma AI model onboard a spacecraft operated by Momentus that cut the size of a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%, savings Afullo says can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite each year. Its software is set to launch Thursday on a SpaceX rocket aboard a spacecraft built by Indian startup TakeMe2Space, serving three customers: NASA, which is paying to test protocols for cloud computing in space; Stellerian, a space surveillance startup testing image processing workloads; and TakeMe2Space itself. The seed round was led by Houston-based Non Sibi Ventures, whose partner Bernard Harris, a former NASA astronaut of more than 20 years, helped ground the firm's conviction; partner Kent Lucas said the firm invested partly because Satlyt does not depend on the uncertain economics of full space data centers. Afullo's goal is to be live on 20% of satellites by the end of the decade, and the company next plans to demonstrate a shared computing system spanning two different satellites, which it expects to attempt next year.

Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, announced the launch of Project Meridian, a research program into the technology and warfare models of the future, bringing in Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, and Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, as leaders of the research effort. Hegseth unveiled the plan during a State of the Force speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, saying the project would focus on finding, developing and fielding new weapons and systems to meet the forms of warfare the US military may face in the coming decades. Musk's SpaceX and Luckey's Anduril are both major contractors for the US Department of Defense. The project will be overseen by Emil Michael, a former Uber executive who currently serves as a senior technology official at the Pentagon. Hegseth did not disclose further details on the budget, timeline or structure of the project. Beyond Project Meridian, Hegseth also announced the establishment of an Autonomous Warfare Command to oversee the management and deployment of US drones and military robotic systems, and said he wants major US bases to be able to produce their own energy to preserve operational capability if the country's power grid is hit by a cyberattack. He also announced plans to set up an office for religious affairs for the military and to build partnerships with academic institutions to expand cadet training programs, with the first group of institutions taking part including Liberty University, Hillsdale College, Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Tuskegee University. At the same time, the US Department of Defense plans to build a new base inside the country for the first time in four decades, with state governments able to compete to host it; the base is expected to accommodate several thousand personnel, and each site could cover several hundred thousand acres. The plan comes as the Pentagon is considering reducing US troop levels in Europe, with Hegseth saying the military will add tens of thousands more personnel overall while shifting its focus back to homeland defense and the Western Hemisphere.

Elon Musk has outlined an ambitious new growth opportunity for SpaceX, revealing plans to eventually launch hundreds of gigawatts of artificial intelligence computing capacity into orbit annually, potentially reaching one terawatt over the longer term. Speaking alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at an America.Gov event on September 29, Musk said SpaceX and Tesla are aiming for approximately 200 gigawatts of annual solar production, and that SpaceX will launch at least a few hundred gigawatts a year of AI compute, noting that 200 gigawatts a year would be a 40% increase annually in United States total energy consumption. He argued that power generation could become one of the biggest constraints on America's ability to compete in artificial intelligence, noting that China's electricity production is roughly three times that of the United States. Musk said Starship would be central to executing the vision, predicting the rocket could eventually achieve a weekly or twice-weekly launch cadence next year following what he described as its first orbital flight. He cautioned that the terawatt ambition remains a long-term possibility rather than a confirmed production commitment, and the economics remain unproven at the proposed scale.

Citi downgraded Moderna to Sell from Neutral, sending shares down 6.88% in premarket trading, with analyst Geoff Meacham calling the valuation "unjustifiable" after a Phase 3 win for the personalized cancer shot intismeran autogene developed with Merck. Workday said it is cutting 2.5% of its workforce, mainly in its Product and Technology team, according to a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and shares slipped 1.23% in early trading. Conagra Brands reported fiscal first-quarter adjusted earnings of $0.41 per share, topping the $0.28 consensus estimate, on revenue of $2.60 billion, roughly in line with the $2.59 billion expected, and shares rose about 3% in premarket trading. SpaceX shares slipped 0.09% in early trading after Anthropic agreed to pay the company up to $84.5 billion to use its computing capacity through 2029, according to Reuters, which viewed a confidential initial public offering prospectus, a figure far larger than the agreement that surfaced in May.

Tesla Inc. entered into $30 billion in new credit facilities on Tuesday as it accelerates investments in artificial intelligence and scales up production of Cybercab robotaxis and Optimus robots. The package comprises a $20 billion three-year delayed-draw term loan with Citibank as administrative agent, an $8 billion five-year revolving credit facility, and a $2 billion 364-day revolving facility, both led by Wells Fargo. Tesla had no borrowings under any of its facilities as of Sept. 29, according to an SEC filing, and it also terminated its 2023 revolving credit agreement, which had no outstanding borrowings. At a Washington event on Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk said Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Tesla are aiming to jointly produce 200 gigawatts of solar power per year. Tesla expects more than $25 billion in capital expenditure this year, with R&D and pre-production ramp spending going to the Cybercab robotaxi, Optimus robot, and Tesla Semi, and Musk has said the company is prioritizing speed over capital efficiency.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned that Delta Air Lines could lose customers for declining to offer Starlink internet on its flights. The warning followed a post on X by user John LeFevre noting that rival United Airlines already has 600 or more aircraft equipped with Starlink, roughly 36% of its fleet, with that figure set to reach 100% by the end of 2027, while Delta has none and no plans for it. Delta has instead chosen Amazon's LEO satellite internet service, and said earlier this year it plans an initial installation of Amazon Leo on 500 aircraft beginning in 2028. Musk has said Delta was in talks with SpaceX over Starlink but wanted the service delivered through its proprietary portal, which SpaceX rejected. Separately, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman praised Starship's first orbital flight on Monday, calling it a gorgeous launch after the rocket reached orbit and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites.

TD Cowen initiated coverage of SpaceX with a Buy rating and a $200 price target on Tuesday, betting that leasing AI data center capacity will quickly become the company's largest business. Analyst John Blackledge expects AI compute leasing to generate $14.4 billion in revenue this year, about 35% of SpaceX's total, before jumping to $66 billion in 2027, or about 58% of sales, making leasing the majority of SpaceX revenue by the first quarter of 2027. SpaceX has four customers leasing its compute capacity: Anthropic, Google, Reflection AI, and an unnamed fourth customer that agreed to a deal starting in December at $1.1 billion per month. TD Cowen expects SpaceX to lease another 4 gigawatts in 2027 and 2028 at $46 billion to $50 billion per gigawatt, and sees terrestrial capacity climbing from 2.1 gigawatts at the end of this year to 6 gigawatts in 2027 and 22 gigawatts by 2031. The bank forecasts 62% annual revenue growth from 2026 through 2031, with EBITDA reaching $297 billion in 2031, and does not expect SpaceX to turn free cash flow positive until 2030.

The Trump administration has launched America.gov, an AI-powered website designed to help Americans navigate federal programs online. The site is powered by two AI agents, Groq and Gemini, from Google and SpaceX, and was developed by Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and now head of the White House's National Design Studio. Users can currently ask questions in plain English, such as applying for a passport or changing a name after marriage, with the technology linking government websites into one destination. Gebbia said he is confident the site will avoid the missteps seen with healthcare.gov, citing the partnership with SpaceX and Google. The site is expected to become fully operational in early 2027, allowing users to fill out forms and complete tasks, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration wants the majority of Americans to apply for passports there going forward.

Elon Musk's net worth ended the week at $925 billion, up more than $305 billion since January, as his path to trillionaire status stalled amid fading momentum at Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla will unveil the long-delayed Roadster, with the base model starting at around $200,000 and the Founders Series at $250,000, limited to 1,000 vehicles, while traders on Polymarket expect third-quarter deliveries of between 450k and 475k vehicles after 480k in the second quarter. SpaceX is set for its first orbital launch on Monday, a test that will carry the third version of Starlink to space; Starlink made over $4.29 billion in the second quarter, accounting for 53% of SpaceX revenue, and analysts expect total revenue to jump to $44 billion this year and $108.3 billion next year. Most of Musk's wealth comes from his 48.5% stake in SpaceX and about 20.3% of Tesla, plus large holdings in Neuralink and The Boring Company.

SpaceX's fully reusable rocket Starship, which the company is developing, succeeded for the first time in reaching Earth orbit on its 14th flight test on September 28, 2026. A vehicle combining the upper-stage spacecraft Ship 41 with the first-stage booster Booster 21 was launched, and although one of the six Raptor engines on the upper stage shut down earlier than planned during ascent, it achieved orbital insertion and released all 26 next-generation communications satellites, Starlink V3, into orbit. The original plan called for roughly six orbits of low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 275 kilometers over about 10 hours, followed by a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, but the flight time was shortened to about three hours following the upper-stage engine malfunction. Previous flight tests of Starship and Super Heavy had deliberately remained on suborbital trajectories with safety as the priority, and the shift to true orbital flight and the demonstration of its capability as a means of transporting operational satellites mark a turning point. SpaceX has won a 2.89 billion dollar HLS development contract from NASA and aims for a crewed lunar landing on Artemis 4 in 2028 and the construction of a long-term activity base on the lunar surface.

U.S. space company SpaceX conducted a launch of Starship, the world's largest rocket, on the 28th, placing it into Earth orbit for the first time on its 14th launch. Nikkei reported the news, saying it gave momentum toward commercialization. Meanwhile, an engine problem occurred during flight, shortening a planned 10-hour mission to 3 hours. Space-related companies are likely to draw attention.

SpaceX plans to launch its massive Starship rocket early Monday, aiming to send the spacecraft into orbit for the first time. According to SpaceX's website, the 75-minute launch window begins at 8:15 a.m. ET, or 7:15 a.m. local time, from the company town of Starbase, Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration told CNBC that it issued a license authorization for the SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Flight 14 launch and reentry operations on Sept. 26. With the 14th test flight of Starship, Elon Musk's aerospace and defense company also plans to deploy 26 of its new Starlink V3 satellites. Starship is critical to SpaceX's expansion plans; on SpaceX's earnings call in August, Musk said it is not out of the question that at some point Starlink will deliver a majority of the world's internet, at least in countries where the company is allowed to operate.

Alphabet will launch an experimental AI satellite as the first hardware of Project Suncatcher on Oct. 1, months ahead of schedule, according to a New York Times report. The satellite, named MVP, will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying four Google tensor processing units with roughly the computing power of one data-center server, powered by solar panels delivering about one kilowatt. Google had first said its Suncatcher prototypes with Planet Labs would launch in early 2027, and to accelerate the timeline it installed its chips in a ready-made Planet Labs satellite, accepting added risk; Google, an investor in Planet Labs, still plans to launch a pair of satellites next year and has designs for fleets of more than 80 satellites flying in close formation. The chips can run for about 15 minutes before shutting down to cool, and the satellite is designed to operate for about a year. Google estimates orbital data centers could become cost-competitive with ground facilities by the mid-2030s, though senior vice president for research James Manyika said, "We don't expect, to be perfectly frank, that we'll have anything usefully operational in the next few years."

Former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, now a founding partner at Gigascale Capital, is backing a plan to build floating autonomous AI inference data centers powered by ocean waves. In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Schroepfer described a big band of the Southern Ocean holding 10 terawatts of wave energy that is currently not harnessed at all. The company's machine is a simple buoy that bobs up and down in the waves and uses that motion to pump water to run a turbine, much like a hydropower dam. Schroepfer said the power has a clear use: with the advent of Starlink and AI inference, the buoy becomes a perfect platform to run AI inference nodes, since Starlink provides plenty of bandwidth and the very cold ocean water makes cooling straightforward. The result, he said, is a floating autonomous AI inference data center.

Private investment in space-related companies surged more than twofold to $23 billion in the year through June, according to a report published by British investment firm Seraphim and insurance company Relm Insurance. SpaceX's June initial public offering transformed the landscape of space-sector fundraising, drawing in new investors, and venture capital firms are now searching for the next related companies that could deliver similarly high returns. Investors are directing funds toward companies that can demonstrate business results rather than early-stage promise, and according to Relm, the space economy is shifting from hype to commercial reality. Companies raising money include those involved in Earth observation, in-orbit manufacturing, and the satellite supply chain. Andrew Bonwick, Relm's vice president of product development, said Earth observation is already an established field and that the real value lies in the analysis, with customers paying for the information they actually want to know, such as the location of their ships, when to plant crops, the operating status of refineries, and wildfire risk.

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic carry a combined $5.2 trillion valuation that exceeds the combined first-day market value of every U.S. technology IPO from 1980 through 2025, a group of 3,365 offerings worth $4.07 trillion as compiled by University of Florida professor Jay Ritter. SpaceX alone holds a market capitalization of almost $2.1 trillion following its June IPO, in which it raised $85.7 billion, while privately held OpenAI is discussing a new funding round at a valuation of roughly $1.2 trillion, up from $852 billion in March, and privately held Anthropic is reportedly targeting about $2 trillion for a potential IPO now anticipated in November. The comparison carries a large asterisk: SpaceX has a live public-market valuation, OpenAI's figure is a proposed private financing valuation, and Anthropic's is a prospective IPO target. OpenAI projects $278 billion of negative free cash flow from 2026 through 2030, with revenue forecast to rise from $36 billion in 2026 to $350 billion in 2030 against about $856 billion of computing infrastructure spending, while Anthropic expects revenue of as much as $18 billion this year and $55 billion in 2027 but has pushed back positive cash flow until 2028. Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok warned clients that major technology companies could need to triple their cash flow by 2030 to sustain the industry's AI infrastructure spending, and that otherwise the AI trade could weaken, credit spreads widen, capex plans be cut, and U.S. GDP growth slow.

Powerlaw Corp. announced an annual dividend program at a 6% rate and the early waiver of all remaining non-affiliate lock-up restrictions on its shares. The Board of Directors approved the program for fiscal year 2027, which begins October 1, 2026, declaring the first three monthly dividends at an annual rate of 6% based on the Fund's August 31, 2026 NAV of $16.23 per share, equal to $0.0812 per share monthly, with the first payment due October 30, 2026 to stockholders of record as of October 20, 2026. Effective September 24, 2026, the Fund waived the remaining lock-up restrictions on non-affiliate shares that would otherwise have been released on November 23, 2026, making 13,716,695 additional shares eligible for immediate sale; the waiver does not apply to directors, officers, employees or contractors. The Fund also disclosed that on September 2, 2026 it sold its first tranche of SpaceX shares for approximately $19.0 million, or $140 per share, as part of its realize-and-reinvest model, and announced three senior appointments at Powerlaw Capital Group: Aayush Phumbhra as Senior Vice President and Partner, Steve Blatney as Vice President of Channel and Distribution, and Nicole Bellefeuille as Vice President of Investor Relations. Management will host a conference call and webcast on September 30, 2026 to discuss the announcements.

SpaceXAI's Grok Bot has surpassed 400,000 users barely a month after launch, reaching 418,000 users as of September 14, up 24% in a single week. The enterprise-focused agentic-AI tool launched in mid-August and is designed to complete tasks across different apps and file types, positioning SpaceXAI to gain traction beyond the consumer chatbot market. The milestone arrived alongside Monday's release of Grok 4.7, which SpaceXAI describes as its most capable frontier model yet for coding and knowledge work. Meta Platforms' competing Muse agent, aimed more directly at consumers, recorded about 730,000 downloads in its first 10 days following its September 8 launch and reached the No. 1 position among free apps on both Apple's U.S. App Store and Google Play. SpaceXAI offers Grok Bot as a standalone application and through multiple AI subscription tiers, giving it several potential routes to convert adoption into recurring revenue.