SpaceX may be a rocket company, but nowadays it feels more like a roller coaster.

This past week alone, Chief Executive Elon Musk watched as its shares plummeted almost 14% in one day—which wasn’t even the worst performance in SpaceX’s short tenure as a publicly traded company. By Friday, the shares had soared more than 20% from where they began the week.

Put another way, that was a more than $300 billion market-value swing.

For most CEOs, that would be a vomit-inducing ride. For Musk, it’s a nagging reminder that he’s back in grind mode, having to deliver on all of his highflying promises for SpaceX’s performance. He made those earlier this year to launch the biggest IPO ever in June, a headier period that has now given way to the more down-to-earth reality of executing on the strategy.

Such volatility is exactly the kind of distraction that frustrated Musk during the grueling years it took him to make Tesla profitable. And the experience informed his decision to hold off on taking SpaceX public for so long.

The grind really ramped up with the release late Tuesday of the company’s first earnings report since going public. That was followed Thursday by a lockup ending for certain insiders and other pre-IPO shareholders.

“As the saying goes…this ain’t rocket science, well actually, rocket science is literally our daily business,” Musk joked as the stock plunged Tuesday evening.

The quarterly results, while better than Wall Street expected, rattled some investors with the size of spending on artificial intelligence. That put Musk in salesman mode for a public call with investors on which he displayed an unusual “pick me” energy for the world’s richest man.

In a matter of minutes, he was trying to one-up himself with the sort of fanciful forecasts that have become the hallmark of his quarterly Tesla calls. For years, Tesla investors have followed those calls closely. His comments—his tone, his excitement or lack of it—often overshadow the automaker’s posted results.

First, Musk told investors that SpaceX would end the year with more than two gigawatts of AI compute and finish next year closer to 10 gigawatts than five. In less than a decade, the CEO continued, the company’s satellite-internet service, Starlink, will deliver a majority of the world’s internet.

“And,” Musk added at one point, “it’s probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching $1 trillion in revenue…have moved up from 2031 to 2030.”

A trillion dollars of revenue, for context, would be essentially the combined sales of Amazon.com and Nvidia in their most-recent fiscal years.

Then, he noted, “there’s a nonzero chance of that being in 2029.”

The unprofitable company had $7.8 billion in sales in the past quarter.

Musk’s ability to excite investors with his vision for the future is one of his greatest abilities as a leader. It has helped him raise the massive fortunes required to build cash-hungry companies.

It’s also what frustrates his critics, who suggest he’s taking less sophisticated, everyday investors for a ride. He’s not saying SpaceX will have a trillion dollars in 2029. But he’s also not not saying it.

Similarly, he told the Economist in an interview that he “got carried away” with his involvement with partisan politics in 2024. Then a few days later, Axios reported Musk plans to spend big again in the midterm elections this fall. Apparently, there’s also a nonzero chance he might get distracted from his day jobs, again.

This past week, the problem for Musk might have been that SpaceX’s actual, impressive achievements seemed downright boring compared with what Musk likes to hype. Doubling Starlink subscriptions to 12 million from a year earlier pales in comparison with talk about life on Mars and social-media posts highlighting AI goon slop.

In recent years, Tesla investors seemed more willing to indulge Musk after he demonstrated that some of his far-out-there ambitions could, actually, be achieved. He brought out the game-changing Model 3 sedan, quickly opened a Chinese factory and delivered consistent profits quarter after quarter.

They rewarded him by valuing Tesla not as a carmaker, but rather as a robotics company, even as he trails Alphabet’s Waymo with developing a robotaxi fleet.

Now, Musk is trying a similar pivot for SpaceX. He is framing the company as not just a rocket maker but also a budding AI powerhouse to rival OpenAI and Anthropic.

A huge chunk (86%) of SpaceX’s recent capital expenditures were for AI. That’s impressive given that, by Musk’s own math, something in the order of $1 trillion is required to colonize Mars—if he can finally get the company’s delayed, giant spaceship working.

Musk’s team argued that the spending on AI data centers would have quick payback, perhaps in less than one year.

Yet not everyone is buying the AI story. Short sellers, investors who gain from a stock price falling, have begun to swarm SpaceX, helping fuel even more volatility. That’s another thing SpaceX now shares with Tesla.

All of which is why Musk carried himself in an unusual fashion Tuesday. He sounded, dare say, patient with analysts and their questions. That was a change from some earlier, infamous Tesla earnings calls when he lost his temper and even berated “boring, bonehead” questions about the meat and potatoes of that company’s business.

Instead, Musk even offered to elaborate on one complex question, sounding sympathetic to an analyst’s plight. “Obviously if somebody’s trying to create a financial model…you have to plug in some numbers here,” Musk said.

And, in his own way, he asked for investors to be patient, too. “Rocket science is an idiomatic expression for extreme technological difficulty,” Musk said. “And there’s a reason for it because, let me tell you, what rockets desperately want to do every flight: They desperately want to blow themselves into tiny pieces.”

Nobody wants that. Not Musk. Not investors. After all, they bought the ticket and, now, they are taking the ride.

Write to Tim Higgins at [email protected]