Elon Musk Just Pulled SpaceX's $1 Trillion Revenue Goal Forward to 2030. Here's the Growth Rate It Requires.

SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) held its first earnings call as a public company on Tuesday, and CEO Elon Musk used it to make an already ambitious goal more ambitious.

The company's internal target for reaching $1 trillion in annual revenue, he said, has moved up a year, from 2031 to 2030. And he put what he called a "non-zero chance" on getting there in 2029.

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That is a striking thing to say about a company that produced $7.8 billion of revenue in the quarter it was reporting. It was a strong quarter, to be sure. Revenue grew 92% year over year, and the rocket and satellite company's net loss narrowed to $541 million from $1.0 billion a year earlier.

A target, of course, isn't guidance. But I think this one is specific enough to check against the company's own numbers. So, what growth rate does $1 trillion by 2030 actually require?

The second quarter gave the bulls plenty to work with. All three segments grew, led by the artificial intelligence (AI) business, where revenue rose 247% year over year to $2.6 billion on new cloud computing agreements -- the company signed $14.1 billion of contracted cloud sales during the quarter alone. The connectivity segment, home of the Starlink satellite internet service, grew revenue 66% year over year to $4.3 billion and stayed the company's profit center, with operating income climbing 79% to $1.7 billion. Even the space segment, the launch business itself, grew 29% year over year to $962 million.

Starlink ended the second quarter with 12 million subscribers, double the year-ago count and up 1.7 million in three months.

Average Starlink revenue per user, though, was $66 per month, down from $85 a year earlier. Subscriber growth is outrunning pricing, not riding it.