But basically it’s a subscription service which they can sell around most of the planet and compete with infrastructure heavy services (as in expensive to replace them). They also have a lot of enterprise customer usecases (like agriculture and construction) as well as cashcow government (army).
Their growth is actually massive compared to last year, and starlink itself is already profitable. Their economy gets better with the investment in the rocket tech. Starship will be able to lift 20x the amount of starlink than falcon 9, apparently also cheaper, while the next gen starlink sats will also be able to serve a lot more customers. That’ll drive their operating cost down, while allowing selling more.
(Just to be clear, spacex as a company is still hot garbage because of the bundling of x and xai and also probably the control structure giving musk all the power while not even holding majority stake, the above is just about starlink and the rocket tech.)
The problem with Starlink is it’s only ever a niche service. There’s a limit to how many satellites you can have in the sky over paying subscribers (as opppsed to, say, deserts or oceans) - I did some back of the envelope maths that put it at about 15 million subscribers with acceptable speeds, maybe double that with terrible service.
By comparison, Deutsche Telekom in Germany alone has 5 times as many mobile subscribers, and a similar number of fixed-line broadband. Amd best of all, Deutsche Telekom doesn’t need to replace all its infrastructure every 5 years when it falls to Earth.
So on what possible basis does Starlink warrant a “to the moon” valuation, and traditional providers don’t? Traditional providers can serve more consumers, at lower cost, with better return on assets…
Starlink, and batshit ideas about datacentres in space, exist for one reason: US infrastructure is complete shit. It would almost certainly be long-run a better investment to fix the power, water, and telecomms infrastructure on the ground, but right now you have a government that would rather private companies fire money into space than pay taxes.
Stsrlink is about the only thing in the company pulling in solid revenue. There’s a good analysis on https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2026/05/30/what-is-starlinks-financial-performance
But basically it’s a subscription service which they can sell around most of the planet and compete with infrastructure heavy services (as in expensive to replace them). They also have a lot of enterprise customer usecases (like agriculture and construction) as well as cashcow government (army).
Their growth is actually massive compared to last year, and starlink itself is already profitable. Their economy gets better with the investment in the rocket tech. Starship will be able to lift 20x the amount of starlink than falcon 9, apparently also cheaper, while the next gen starlink sats will also be able to serve a lot more customers. That’ll drive their operating cost down, while allowing selling more.
(Just to be clear, spacex as a company is still hot garbage because of the bundling of x and xai and also probably the control structure giving musk all the power while not even holding majority stake, the above is just about starlink and the rocket tech.)
The problem with Starlink is it’s only ever a niche service. There’s a limit to how many satellites you can have in the sky over paying subscribers (as opppsed to, say, deserts or oceans) - I did some back of the envelope maths that put it at about 15 million subscribers with acceptable speeds, maybe double that with terrible service.
By comparison, Deutsche Telekom in Germany alone has 5 times as many mobile subscribers, and a similar number of fixed-line broadband. Amd best of all, Deutsche Telekom doesn’t need to replace all its infrastructure every 5 years when it falls to Earth.
So on what possible basis does Starlink warrant a “to the moon” valuation, and traditional providers don’t? Traditional providers can serve more consumers, at lower cost, with better return on assets…
Starlink, and batshit ideas about datacentres in space, exist for one reason: US infrastructure is complete shit. It would almost certainly be long-run a better investment to fix the power, water, and telecomms infrastructure on the ground, but right now you have a government that would rather private companies fire money into space than pay taxes.