SpaceX Targets Telcos, Lifts Nvidia in Earnings Call

SpaceX held its quarterly earnings call Tuesday, and the fallout spread across three sectors by Wednesday morning. Telecom stocks sold off after Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink would build a terrestrial wireless network and go after subscribers at AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), and T-Mobile (TMUS).

"I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better," Shotwell said on the call.

The threat landed hard enough that Deutsche Telekom (DTEGY) CEO Timotheus Hottges addressed it on his own earnings call Thursday. "We take SpaceX ambitions very seriously," Hottges said. "I'm a little bit irritated how the market is reacting on some of that one. We do not see any kind of significant disadvantage for our technologies."

Elon Musk used part of the call to talk about building 20 gigawatts of power. That caught the attention of Melius Research managing director James West, who said it was "a clear positive for equipment suppliers." West highlighted GE Vernova (GEV), Baker Hughes (BKR), Constellation Energy (CEG), NextEra Energy (NEE), Vistra (VST), and EQT Corporation (EQT) as potential beneficiaries.

Then Musk made a sweeping endorsement of Nvidia (NVDA). "Going forward, we've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture," Musk said. "We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia. We're exclusive to Nvidia."

NVDA shares rose 3.4% after those comments, extending the stock's recent run. Nvidia carries an Alpha Score of 77/100, graded Strong, reflecting its dominant position in AI compute.

EchoStar (ECHO), an early SpaceX investor holding 261.8 million shares, has seen its stock move increasingly in step with the rocket maker's fortunes, management said on its own earnings call.

SpaceX remains a private company, but its equity is the most-researched ticker on Yahoo Finance over the past month, according to platform data. The list of most-viewed stocks also included Palantir (PLTR), Intel (INTC), Arm, Dell, Twilio, and Natera. Palantir scores 51/100 on the Alpha scale (Mixed), while Intel's Alpha Score of 22/100 lands in Weak territory. The market's focus on those names this week had more to do with sector rotation than any direct link to the SpaceX call.

For now, investors keep looking for signs that SpaceX will repeat the kind of disruption Tesla created. Musk and his team seem happy to provide them.

Yahoo Finance's Jake Conley contributed reporting.