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So, from 1% of market cap to 2%?
Spread over shareholders who still hold north of 90% of the company?
China (and India and Brazil, among others) are all making huge investments in aerospace. The EU is certainly making a lot of noise, but because everything is privatized to fuck, what you’re left with is guess like Richard Branson paddin wallets while programs like the FCAS flounder.
Starlink is still the modern word in satellite communication. That’s worth a few hundred billion on it’s face.
Will this advantage last? Idk. Probably not, but maybe.
At a minimum, if you want to be friendly with America, you’ll need to buy from Musk.
Starlink, which is nowhere near worth that much even under a best case scenario (compare to other comm companies), can make money and SpaceX still not make any profits because of the the xAI money pit. Also, no, the advantage will not last. The last 30 years of satellite communications have been one seemingly promising idea after another that fizzled out or was made obsolete. No reason to think that trend will change now, especially not when the Starlink model is extremely resource intensive.
The existing network plus whatever Elon Musk can launch in the next twenty years, assuming an absence of competition could be a trillion dollar company. When you’ve got a monopoly on military satellite technology in a market full of warring super states, that’s a lot of economic leverage.
I’m deeply skeptical that he’ll have that edge for long. But I can at least interesting someone who thinks it’s worth a gamble.
And that no one comes up with a better tech and extending it out 20 years for… reasons. Sure. Ok. Trillion dollar company under those very reasonable assumptions.
Musk’s done an excellent job of cornering the market in a few other sectors, EVs most notably. You’ll notice how all the other American firms and even a few of the Japanese and Korean companies are bowing out and running away.
I’m not saying its a safe bet. But it’s not as unreasonable as you might think.
The existing network will be gone within a few years. By design. If all goes well for SpaceX, it will have been replaced by a new network, which will also be gone within a few years.
Just pointing out that the existing network can’t be relied upon without continued re-investment constantly. It’s hard to build up a strong first mover advantage when the fruits of the effort burn up in the atmosphere routinely.
Who is going to pay the money for there to be a reasonable return on that value? I don’t have Starlink, I have no need for it, since there’s a cable coming into where I live. Sure there’s people that live in remote places that it’s useful for. But that’s not a lot of people.
There are military applications, but Musk is a flake not military wants to be dependent on him. Every country in the world is spending a lot of money to end their dependence on the US defense industrial complex, so there will be alternatives for military purposes.
Maybe it can work in vehicles? But if the price is too high people will just use 5G or just go without access for a while.
Starlink is just a product to fill in some edge cases. It will probably make a steady profit, but there will be competition from Europe and China before too long.
Government militaries, mostly. The Pentagon and it’s NATO allies, militaries across the Pacific Rim, Ukraine, etc.
Yeah, so everyone is moving away from dependencies on the US. Not likely anyone will want their comms dependent on a system a US President (or Elon Musk) can shut down for leverage in a trade deal.
Balance of Trade with the US has only grown year-over-year for the last decade, with the singular exception of 2023.
Everyone is not moving away from US dependencies, especially wrt to natural gas imports. European liberals are flirting with a degree of sovereign independence, while European conservatives are more and more aligned with MAGA tech billionaires. Latin American fascists are fully enthralled by the Rubio State Department as everyone from El Salvador to Costa Rica to Honduras to Peru race to build out the biggest network of Supermax Prisons for their northern neighbors to exploit. Out in the Pacific Rim, all the countries with American military bases are churning out pro-American politicians as fast as their mega-corporations can mint them. From South Korea to Japan to the Philippines to Australia, it’s been a parade of Trump-friendly flunkies and ultra-nationalist goon squads. India’s more aligned with America than it has ever been. The Middle Eastern states, from Egypt to Qatar to Turkiye, love Trump and can’t stop sending him bribe money. The big African economies, from Nigeria to Cameroon to Ethiopia, have all been aligned with Trump since his first term (thanks largely to his friendliness with international petrochemical firms).
I wish that were true, but it simply is not. Multi-nationals and government militaries are all very eager to sign on with Musk, while their host countries debate the merits of investing in alternative programs. But, for the time being, Starlink is really the only game in town.
Only silly Americans think geopolitics has anything to do with “liberals”. This is realpolitk, son. Trump has made the US an unreliable ally. It will take time, but the rest of the world will detach from the US. We aren’t going to build a military industrial complex in a day, but it’s going to happen.
In the first Trump term people thought it was a blip. Americans got scammed into voting for that clown. But after Jan. 6 he revealed to the world who he really was. Then y’all voted him in again. You proved it wasn’t a blip, Trump represents who you really are.
The US can’t be the arsenal of democracy when it doesn’t really believe in democracy anymore. The arsenal of democracy will be elsewhere in the future.