Elon Musk's company has struggled to maintain investor enthusiasm that greeted its stock market debut.

SpaceX has delivered its first-ever quarterly business report, which showed revenue nearly doubled but its spending skyrocketed. The company, run by Elon Musk, builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites and owns the social media platform X. It began trading on the US stock market in June. SpaceX said its revenue had grown 92% to $7.8bn (£5.8bn) compared with a year ago, but its spending was up more than 550% to $18.3bn, on top of a net loss of $2bn during the first six months of the year. Its stock fell nearly 9% in after-hours trading. Musk said during a call with financial analysts and investors afterwards that people seemed to be "underestimating" SpaceX. He cites Starlink, the one part of the company that is currently making a profit, bringing in $1.6bn in the second quarter. Musk said he expects that business to grow exponentially in the coming years. "It's not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will operate most of the world's internet," Musk said. He also spoke of an expected and rapid growth of SpaceX's emerging line of business selling compute power needed for artificial intelligence (AI) projects to other companies, which currently include Google and Anthropic. Although SpaceX currently has 1.4 gigawatts of such compute power ready to use, Musk said that sometime next year that capacity should hit at least 10 gigawatts through its ongoing development of data centres.