Nearly 25% of Google’s Q1 net income reportedly came from its SpaceX investment

Last night and into this morning, Alphabet investors have been cheering yesterday’s big earnings beat after the tech giant posted revenue and earnings-per-share figures that surpassed Wall Street expectations for the first quarter of the year. 

While there were a handful of big numbers in the Google parent company’s earnings for shareholders to get stoked about, like Google Cloud revenue jumping 28% year over year to hit $12.3 billion, or YouTube ad revenue climbing 10% in the same period, one figure fell a little by the wayside in the excitement. From the report: 

“Net Gain on Equity Securities

OI&E of $11.2 billion for the three months ended March 31, 2025 included an $8.0 billion unrealized gain on our non-marketable equity securities related to our investment in a private company.”

The mysterious, unnamed private company that added an extra $8 billion to the search behemoth’s bottom line in Q1? Elon Musk’s SpaceX, per Bloomberg reporting. 

We have liftoff

In December, it was reported that the valuation of Musk’s private rocket company had soared by almost $100 billion in just one month, reaching $350 billion after its latest round of employee share purchases. That was good news for Musk, certainly, whose stake in SpaceX outweighed his Tesla shares on paper in February, but also for other big investors in the 23-year-old business, not least Google.

In early 2015 — months before cofounder Larry Page had even announced the formation of Alphabet as Google’s parent company — the business made a joint $1 billion investment in SpaceX alongside Fidelity, giving the two a combined ~10% stake in Musk’s company, which was “exploring new ways to connect people to the internet” at the time. Those ambitions would be realized down the line with Starlink’s growing fleet, while Google’s 2015 investment in the rocket business is clearly still paying off a decade later.