Reading AI Burn Rates from SpaceX Financials: Assessing True Spending Capacity

I spent the weekend tinkering around and dug out SpaceX's Q2 earnings report to read through it a few times. The company went public in June with an IPO valuation of $86 billion, making it one of the most watched tech stocks this year. As soon as the earnings came out, the stock dropped 9%, dragging Broadcom down by 10% too. The market reaction was pretty interesting—overall performance beat expectations, but investors kept fixating on AI spending. I'm using this as a case study to write a zero-to-one tutorial teaching you how to figure out from an earnings report exactly how much a company is spending on AI, and whether that money is well spent.