During SpaceX’s inaugural earnings call, Elon Musk made some remarkable assertions regarding the company’s operations and outlook, while his colleagues attempted to ground his visionary thoughts — hinting at what lies ahead now that his rocket-launching, compute-leasing, satellite-driven telecom arm is public.

The call, conducted on Tuesday, is part of a long series where Musk makes bold assertions, leaving his team to temper them for investors — similar to Tesla, where a recent TechCrunch study revealed the world’s richest man is increasingly drawn to visionary concepts while his team focuses on the nuts and bolts of automobile sales.

Let’s begin with one of Musk’s most daring assertions from the call: he anticipates that SpaceX’s Starlink service will “provide a majority of the world’s internet” in “under 10 years.” This statement was made in relation to SpaceX’s upcoming launch of its first “V3” Starlink satellites, which offer significantly higher bandwidth than their predecessors.

Here’s what he expressed:

It’s somewhat challenging for people to comprehend, but it’s conceivable that Starlink could deliver a majority of the world’s internet, particularly in nations where we’re permitted to operate, which is most nations. So this is something important to keep in mind, and it’s not in some distant future. It’s, you know, under 10 years.

In contrast, chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell stated just a few minutes later, with emphasis added:

The substantial capacity we can add to the Starlink constellation through the V3 satellites will allow us to continue enhancing our service — and it’s already quite impressive — while serving an increasing number of customers globally. In fact, in the coming years, we anticipate Starlink will account for a significant share of global internet traffic, which Elon also mentioned.

This claim is much more cautiously formulated, although still ambitious.

However, this was not the only moment where Musk’s optimism ran high. At one juncture, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen presented investors with one of the few financial targets discussed during the call. Johnsen highlighted SpaceX’s relatively recent venture into offering compute power rental to other AI companies, which has generated billions in new and rapid revenue.

I’ll reiterate the significant promise Johnsen made during his prepared comments, noting how carefully he expressed it. His statement was very cautious and precise, clearly designed to excite investors while leaving the company some leeway to dodge legal repercussions if it falls short of the forecast:

Looking forward, we continue to observe strong demand across all three of our sectors, particularly within our cloud service agreements. We’re witnessing increasingly favorable economic conditions with each deal we finalize, and as Elon indicated, we foresee the supply-demand gap in the compute sector persisting. The current economics have led to a payback period of less than one year for our new capital investments in compute. For instance, in the initial weeks of the third quarter, we’ve already secured an additional $6.7 billion in cloud service revenue over a six-month timeframe starting this October. We believe this positions us towards reaching $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate by year-end, based on our expected revenue for December.

Twenty minutes later, Musk countered that meticulously crafted statement with an immediate inflation of it:

To clarify, the $100 billion ARR in December is not uncertain. That’s… that’s what we would hit even if we basically did nothing. So, you know, I think it might be higher than that. It likely will be higher than that.

Musk also elaborated on another major revenue prediction during the call, enhancing a target that SpaceX articulated merely two months prior in its IPO filings:

It might also be pertinent to note that our internal forecasts for achieving a trillion dollars in revenue, not ARR, but overall revenue, have advanced from 2031 to 2030. So before the IPO, our financial projections indicated a trillion dollars in revenue by 2031. We now expect that to occur in 2030, and there’s a non-negligible possibility it will happen in 2029.

This pattern kept reappearing throughout the call. A question from a shareholder regarding advancements on the “human landing system” that SpaceX is creating for NASA’s Artemis lunar missions via Starship led Musk to hint that the prototype rocket will be ready to transport people by next year’s end. He later asserted that SpaceX would be operating Starship rockets once daily, or “potentially more,” by this time next year.

Shotwell promptly followed Musk’s comments regarding human flight to clarify that SpaceX remains focused on NASA-mandated benchmarks, and presented a more vague (yet still ambitious) aspiration (emphasis mine) that “we want to have boots on the ground, boots on the moon, in 2028.”

None of this will materialize unless SpaceX can demonstrate that Starship can operate reliably and, critically, become fully reusable. A pivotal aspect of achieving reusability is the heat shield that prevents the Starship upper stage from disintegrating upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. The company experienced optimal results from its enhanced heat shield during its most recent test flight of Starship, which successfully splashed down in the Indian Ocean last month and remains intact. However, even before the rocket stage had been retrieved, Musk proclaimed on Tuesday that he would “consider the heat shield issue resolved at this juncture.”

Musk has made numerous extravagant promises about SpaceX that ultimately went unfulfilled, such as asserting in 2016 that he would send humans to Mars within six years. The difference today is that SpaceX is a public enterprise, ostensibly subject to regulations and penalties if the company and its executives make commitments they are aware cannot be fulfilled.

Of course, the Securities and Exchange Commission has significantly reduced Corporate enforcement, especially regarding public companies. The Department of Justice is similarly scaling back. And if SpaceX fails to deliver on Musk’s ambitious assertions, investors may find themselves with limited recourse in civil court — because the company has effectively shielded itself against such lawsuits by incorporating in Texas.