" Elon Musk looks to be losing his powers. SpaceX shareholders didn’t like their chief executive’s promises of huge spending to come in an AI race that only seems to be boosting hardware suppliers.

 
When Musk presents Tesla earnings, he often lifts the stock with bold statements about the robot-dominated future to come. But when it comes to SpaceX, his comments seemed to have the opposite effect.

 
The world’s richest person, who briefly became the first trillionaire, made big pledges alongside SpaceX’s earnings late Tuesday—chief among them that the rockets-telecoms-AI conglomerate could generate $1 trillion in revenue as soon as 2029. But it was surging capital expenditure that was the market focus and which spooked investors.

 
Musk is hardly alone in his huge spending. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle are committed to a cumulative $800 billion in capex this year alone. However, those companies already have huge cashflows to fund their outlays. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s $18.4 billion quarterly capex is more than double its revenue, never mind its earnings. "