Starlink needs a reality check



We should all be for vision and ambition.

Few have demonstrated the power of both better than Elon Musk. SpaceX has transformed the economics of space launch, while Starlink has shown that low-Earth-orbit satellites can deliver broadband connectivity on a remarkable scale. There is plenty to admire.

Starlink says it has a new ambition: not simply to fill coverage gaps, but to become a ubiquitous communications platform — potentially offering broadband, mobile service, handsets, and even operating systems.

This audacious vision runs headlong into the forces that have constrained telecommunications for decades: the laws of physics, economics, and regulation.

The laws of physics don’t bend to stock prices. The laws of economics don’t care about hype. And regulators don’t care how disruptive the pitch sounds.

The first reality check is physics.

Starlink’s strength of remote area coverage to fill gaps becomes a limitation in cities. Terrestrial networks divide coverage into thousands of cells, enabling repeated spectrum reuse and capacity scaling. Satellite beams cannot match this granular spectrum efficiency.

The next challenge is buildings. Satellite signals do not penetrate shopping malls, offices, apartment blocks, or underground space. People spend much of their time indoors, places that require terrestrial networks, small cells, Wi-Fi, fiber, and other ground-based infrastructure.

This is not a satellite model failure; it just demonstrates that no single network can do it all. Different networks have strengths and weaknesses: The ability to fill coverage gaps is not the same as providing reliable, nationwide capacity. SpaceX says it plans to build a terrestrial component. This will likely strengthen its network, but it does not make satellites a substitute for terrestrial networks.

Then comes the law of economics.

Telecom has an elusive holy grail: the fourth operator. Regulators and competition authorities routinely argue that markets need four or five mobile networks. Yet mobile markets around the world are consolidating toward three, and sometimes two, operators — including sophisticated markets such as India and China. Why? Because mobile networks have enormous fixed costs.

Operators must acquire spectrum, obtain permits, build sites, and continually upgrade networks as traffic grows — all while consumers expect more data for less money. Starlink is not immune to this reality. It has added demand surcharges for some customers, pushing broadband prices as high as $1,500 per month in some markets.

The fourth-operator dream has another inconvenient history. Starlink acquired 65 MHz of spectrum from EchoStar for $19.6 billion. That spectrum came from DISH Network, which spent years trying to make itself the fourth nationwide U.S. mobile operator but could not get the economics to work

Starlink has advantages DISH did not, including its satellite network, capital, and global customer base. But it still must overcome the conundrum of continuously absorbing more traffic while keeping customer prices low.

RELATED: Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.

Baona/iStock/Getty Images

Then there is the law of regulation.

Telecommunications is not a “move fast and break things” industry. Spectrum is governed by complex national, technical, and international rules. Deployment requires coordination with other spectrum users, permitting, environmental reviews, zoning, rights-of-way, and state public utility commissions.

SpaceX has already experienced this reality. When California regulators objected to aspects of SpaceX's launch plans, the company moved activity to Texas. Internationally, governments can be even more consequential. Turkey, for example, has not allowed Starlink to operate within its borders.

Spectrum creates another obligation. Public spectrum is not an ordinary asset. It is allocated according to set conditions, often including build-out or use requirements.

Finally, there is the law of the market.

Investors love news: big ambitions, disruptive narratives, barbs, and vibes. SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said on the company’s first earnings call that she expected Starlink to win “quite a few” customers from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile and that SpaceX “definitely” intends to build a terrestrial component. The comments rattled some telecom investors. Such statements are catnip for traders: the market can trade on the story long before the network exists. It is a familiar asymmetry: incumbents must respond to the threat today, while Starlink can promise to deliver the network tomorrow — or never.

Starlink deserves both praise and scrutiny. Its satellite network is extraordinary, and direct-to-device connectivity will fill coverage gaps. But disrupting the mobile market is not the same as replacing mobile carriers, just as owning spectrum is not the same as building a nationwide network.

The laws of physics don’t bend to stock prices. The laws of economics don’t care about hype. And regulators don’t care how disruptive the pitch sounds. The markets may react to the statement, but seriously competing for customers at scale will require a robust terrestrial network. Starlink has already shown that hard things are possible. It has not yet shown how it can do this.

Host Goes Off Script & Elon Musk Gives an Unexpectedly Deep Answer
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Host Goes Off Script & Elon Musk Gives an Unexpectedly Deep Answer

Elon Musk is Building the LARGEST Structure on Earth
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Elon Musk is Building the LARGEST Structure on Earth

Elon Musk's new megaproject is about to transform Texas



Grimes County, Texas, is about to become ground zero for Elon Musk's biggest swing yet.

It's another crushing loss for California, which, once upon a time, might well have played host to the gargantuan project.

To no one's surprise, it won't come cheap. Musk's companies are starting with an initial investment of $16.8 billion, with a goal of $55 billion and the possibility of the figure rising to nearly $120 billion if extra phases are completed, Reuters reported.

The ambitious goal is to create a one-stop shop to address the needs of SpaceX, Tesla, and the U.S. government, all under one roof.

But that's not all.

'Thousands of high-paying jobs in the Lone Star State.'

The announcement of the facility, dubbed Terafab, comes after President Trump signed an executive order in late June that called for increased focus on and production in quantum computing.

White House Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios said there needed to be an increase in the domestic supply chain for products like superconducting circuits and semiconductors.

Elon Musk is following up the Trump administration's call to ramp up chip production with Terafab, which will sprawl out to one-sixth the size of Manhattan. That's roughly 10 times the size of Tesla's Gigafactory Texas, which itself was launched as another move to evacuate California's rough corporate environment.

Put another way, Terafab will span the size of about 60 NFL stadiums.

The complex will make, package, and test advanced memory chips that will reportedly be used as the backbone of Tesla's Optimus robots and driverless Cybercabs, in addition to being the bedrock for SpaceX data centers.

RELATED: The rockets are still blowing up. So why is Elon laughing on his SpaceX earnings call?

RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images

Musk has been clear on the subject, framing the factory as a must-have for chip production.

Along with the 100-million-square-foot facility will be approximately 3,000 jobs and an unknown number of power plants. "The Terafab is bringing cutting-edge manufacturing to America, creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the Lone Star State, and enabling us to produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space," Musk said.

Notably, Musk is making a big bet on using gas power plants for the venture, not solar energy.

This may come as a surprise to some, as Musk has made significant investments in solar energy dating back to 2016, when he purchased energy company SolarCity for $2.6 billion in an all-stock deal.

As TechCrunch reported, SpaceX's data center development team has indicated it will be bringing its own power to the Texas plant, while also including "very large battery arrays."

RELATED: Trump writes new rules to stop rogue AI — but they're classified

Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Getty Images

As if that's not enough, Musk will also be directly competing with the largest semiconductor makers in the world, such as TSMC, which is racing ahead with a huge expansion of its Arizona facility.

Terafab will do this by implementing free-electron laser technology. The "intense, powerful beams of laser light" are better for making the most advanced, smallest-feature chips, because they can produce extremely powerful light while remaining tunable. This allows for faster chip production.

"FEL FTW," Musk wrote on X in response to rumors.

"We either build the Terafab," said Musk, "or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab."

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The rockets are still blowing up. So why is Elon laughing on his SpaceX earnings call?



Some rockets go up. Some come back down. And some, well, blow up.

At a glance, it's business as usual for SpaceX, and it comes at a cost: a net loss of $541 million in the second quarter of this year. Market jitters about the company's enormous AI spend, in a crowded field with deep-pocketed competitors, pushed its stock down around 10%, enough to fuel jeers from Elon Musk's sizable audience of haters and skeptics.

'They desperately want to blow themselves into tiny pieces.'

On SpaceX's Q2 earnings call, however, Musk himself couldn't hold back a laugh or two.

After all, despite his participation in the ultra-high-spend AI industry, SpaceX is, first and foremost, about space.

"Rocket science is literally our daily business," he said on the call. "And rocket science is an idiomatic expression for extreme technological difficulty, and there's a reason for it. Because let me tell you what rockets desperately want to do every flight. They desperately want to blow themselves into tiny pieces. And then the engineering struggle is to convince the rocket not to blow itself into tiny pieces and actually deliver payload to orbit."

In the chat with investors, Musk went on to accentuate the positive: massive revenues that surpassed expectations. All told, the earnings report noted, revenues were up 92%.

In fact, following its initial public offering in June, SpaceX managed to blast by revenue expectations by nearly one billion dollars. CNBC reported that Q2 2026 revenue expectations were set around $6.93 billion, but SpaceX outpaced estimates and brought in $7.81 billion.

SpaceX is still not yet profitable, but that doesn't tell the whole story. That $541 million loss is a near half-billion improvement from the $1 billion in the red notched the same quarter last year.

Much of the company's losses came from research and development in the space sector, where as Grok/xAI and Starlink sectors proved to be far more positive.

None of this prevented Musk from verbalizing everything from bold predictions to astronomical promises.

In discussions about SpaceX's Starship and its impact "on the future of civilization," Musk detailed a goal of delivering one million tons of payload to orbit per year, including satellite, hardware, and cargo, eventually increasing that figure to 10 million tons per year.

To put that into perspective, SpaceX's current annualized run-rate of payload into space is roughly 2,500 metric tons.

RELATED: Mars Needs Cowboys

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Musk urged and encouraged his competitors to copy what his company is doing, an easy stunt to pull given none of them have come close to SpaceX's achievements. Referring to an internal graph comparing launch volume of similar companies, Musk said that his "next competitor was one pixel high" on the screen.

"I think our competitors are very smart people, but despite being very smart, the rockets still blow up," Musk laughed.

RELATED: Tech-crazed Chinese are selling — and stealing — human faces. Are we next?

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell, also on the call, focused on the growth coming from an increase in subscribers to xAI's internet company Starlink, which added more than 1.7 million customers in Q2. This represented the company's biggest increase to date, which now totals 12 million subscribers.

With more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, Musk detailed the sheer computing power being used by the company would be more than two gigawatts by the end of the year and between five and 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.

By comparison, a single data center used by Meta takes about 2.2 gigawatts of power.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Musk continues to nurse his goals on the grandest scale. He even admitted, "I know this sounds totally nuts," before later declaring, "We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon. We're going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that."

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Foreign-Born Judges Took Over The Courts - Then Targeted Trump | 6/23/26
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Foreign-Born Judges Took Over The Courts - Then Targeted Trump | 6/23/26

Who wants to eat a trillionaire?



Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a century ago. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

Last week’s SpaceX initial public offering made company founder and CEO Elon Musk the world’s first publicly known trillionaire — very different from all of us, at least on paper.

Bad enough he became too rich. Worse, Elon Musk became too independent.

On paper is doing plenty of heavy lifting. We’ll get back to that.

If billionaires “shouldn’t exist,” as our boring socialist friends never tire of saying, then a trillionaire must be not merely obscene but downright apocalyptic. If the existence of billionaires is a policy failure, the arrival of a trillionaire is a crime scene. Call Congress! Summon the United Nations! Eat the rich!

Let me tell you about the very left-wing. They are different from you and me. They enjoy little, and it does something to them. It makes them covetous where normal people are merely curious, bitter where normal people are merely skeptical, and stupid where the rest of us are trying very hard to be charitable.

Musk’s gargantuan wealth is a test no leftist can pass.

“If we liquidated Elon Musk as a financial entity we could each pocket $3,000,” one frivolous X user wrote. “Just putting that out there. 3K. Not bad.”

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire but it’s def the people on SNAP ruining your life,” a tedious Democratic strategist posted.

“Right? He could fund SNAP himself and still have a boatload left to spare,” a pseudonymous Marxist replied.

This is what happens when resentment collides with arithmetic.

“Elon Musk could easily fund” makes for a terrific party game, especially if everyone playing has skipped high school civics, freshman economics, and the day in third grade when Mrs. Campbell broke the news that Monopoly money was not legal tender.

RELATED: A child’s guide to why billionaires should, in fact, exist

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With $1 trillion, Musk could buy every major carmaker in America, Europe, and Japan. With $1 trillion, Musk could fund global famine relief dozens of times over, provide clean water to the world, rebuild Gaza, or hand every person on earth a modest cash gift. With $1 trillion, Musk could cover the United Nations’ humanitarian appeals, the Australian budget, or — according to my friend Mac Owens — roughly 3.5 miles of Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail system.

Cool. Put it all on the board. Have fun. Pour another drink. (Maybe pour me one, too.)

But Musk does not have $1 trillion in a checking account. He is not Scrooge McDuck swan-diving into a vault of gold coins (not that it would even work that way). He owns shares in companies that other people believe are valuable because those companies build things, launch things, connect things, sell things, and promise things investors think may be worth a lot more later.

His wealth is not a pile of cash. It is a claim on productive enterprise.

The socialist imagination never really gets past the pile. The left sees wealth and pictures a dragon atop a hoard. It sees equity and imagines stolen bread. It sees a balance sheet and imagines a pantry that can be raided without consequence.

But Musk’s wealth cannot be “liquidated” without destroying much of the value the envious wish to seize. Sell enough shares, and the price falls. Seize the company, and watch the engineers leave. Convert capital into consumption, and the thing that made the wealth possible begins to disappear.

Welcome to Economics 102. Economics 101 teaches scarcity. Economics 102 teaches that capital is not loot.

None of this makes Musk a saint. I don’t know if he is a good man. I don’t know if any man should have as much influence as he has, and neither do his fanboys. Musk is erratic, strange, reckless, sometimes brilliant, and often his own worst enemy. But he is not a political theory. He is not a catechism. He is not your dad.

I know do this much, though: If Musk had not bought Twitter in 2022 for the eye-watering sum of $44 billion, Americans would know less about their own country and less about the people who presume to manage it.

That purchase did not make him richer. It made him more dangerous.

Dangerous to whom? To the people who think “misinformation” means information they cannot control. To governments that prefer pressure campaigns to open censorship. To NGOs that discovered a business model in laundering political speech control through the language of “safety.” To journalists who miss the days when a few institutions could decide which scandals were real and which ones respectable people were expected not to notice.

RELATED: Democrats love free speech — until conservatives get some

mikkelwilliam/iStock/Getty Images

This is why the hatred aimed at Musk is never really about money. The money supplies the moral pretext. Control supplies the motive.

The left does not hate Musk because he could “fund SNAP.” The federal government already spends enormous sums on SNAP, and no serious person believes American nutrition policy should depend on one weird rich guy hawking rocket shares. The left hates Musk because he took a portion of his unrealized fortune and bought a speech platform that was supposed to belong forever to the consensus managers.

Bad enough he became too rich. Worse, he became too independent.

A billionaire who funds the approved foundations may be vulgar, but he can be managed. A billionaire who underwrites lawsuits, climate conferences, university centers, “democracy” initiatives, and grants for people who use the word “equity” as an incantation may still be welcomed at the proper tables. His money can be baptized.

Musk’s money did something else. It bought the key to a door the regime wanted to remain locked.

No wonder they want to eat him.

4,400 regular SpaceX employees just became millionaires — and the left isn't happy about it



When Juan Hernandez began working at SpaceX, his salary was $28 an hour.

Now, after Elon Musk’s SpaceX gave him $10,000 in stock when he went full-time in 2015 — he’s a millionaire.

But he’s not alone. The company has now created 4,400 new millionaires across the employees. Even better, around 400 of the 4,400 are sitting on stakes worth over a hundred million each.

“It’s incredible,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”


However, many left-wing politicians don’t feel the same way.

Democrat nominee for Senator in Maine Graham Platner aired his frustration at Musk when he posted on X: “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s make sure he’s also the last.”

“Why?” Gray asks. “How does that affect anyone else’s income other than making 4,400 of his workers millionaires and a few of them billionaires? How is that a bad thing? I can’t understand it.”

“This Marxist theory that has infiltrated our country and people who are in positions of power,” he continues. “Frightening. It’s just frightening.”

Executive producer Keith Malinak is in agreement.

“Yeah, they want you to believe that they’re for the little guy. But when the little guy has a chance to succeed, no, no, no, no. We want you to be the little guy still,” he adds.

Want more from Pat Gray?

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How SpaceX Became The Dutch East India Company Of The Space Age

Free markets permit ambitious people like Elon Musk to bet on a better future and sort the winners from the losers.

HOT STOCK: SpaceX IPO is making even its welders rich



A welder named Juan Hernandez joined SpaceX in 2015 at $28 an hour. He took stock instead of a fatter paycheck. The day the company was listed, those shares were worth about $880,000.

He has company. More than 4,000 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires when the company began trading on the Nasdaq at $135 a share. The valuation hit $1.77 trillion, the seventh-largest public company and ahead of Tesla. It was the biggest IPO ever recorded. About 400 of those workers now hold stakes above $100 million, and some of them ladle soup in the cafeteria.

The teenager weighing a coding boot camp against welding school should study the leaderboard in Brownsville.

Learn to weld

That last part flips the usual script. Rank-and-file employees have struck gold in stock debuts before, but most often they were the ones writing code or creating marketing decks

This time it’s very different.

SpaceX handed equity down to welders, machinists, and line workers at Starbase, many of whom took below-market pay for shares. The bet looked reckless a decade ago, back when SpaceX still lost rockets on the launchpad. Today, the only thing still exploding is their net worth.

The setting makes it stranger. Brownsville sits near the bottom of every income chart in Texas, and SpaceX put more than 3,000 jobs there. Home prices in Cameron County have more than doubled since the rockets arrived, climbing from around $131,000 in 2014 to over $281,000.

Critics call that unaffordable, but the complaint misses who is doing the buying. The new money was earned in the county, by people who lived there before SpaceX showed up. When a poor town's home values double on the back of local paychecks, the residents hold the deeds. Rising prices turn dangerous when wages sit still. Brownsville got richer faster than it got expensive.

Deskbound

Now for the mandatory dread about machines coming for our jobs and, in the more ominous forecasts, our throats. But now automation is a white-collar problem. AI can draft a deal sheet or pass the bar exam. What it can't do is snake a wire past a joist or seal a fuel tank that holds at cryogenic temperatures without splitting. The jobs vanishing first are the ones done sitting down. Paralegals should sweat. Plumbers can light up a cigarette and relax.

In April, a humanoid robot built by the phone maker Honor finished a Beijing half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, quicker than any human has run the distance. A year before that, at the first such race, one machine toppled at the start and another walked into a barrier, and every robot needed a human handler jogging beside it like a parent at a toddler's first steps. Ask one of those to fish a cable through a finished wall and find the live wire before something ignites. Fine motor control and sound judgment still belong to people. The robots can run, but keep them away from your breaker box.

So the trades have an opening, and it widens if manufacturing returns. A factory needs hands long before it needs a wellness coordinator. The teenager weighing a coding boot camp against welding school should study the leaderboard in Brownsville.

RELATED: The first trillionaire: SpaceX goes public — and it's not just Elon Musk who's striking it rich

Marvin Joseph/Washington Post/Getty Images

Elon earned it

Then there is Musk. The IPO makes him a trillionaire, the richest man alive. Bernie Sanders, the millionaire who wrote a best-seller about the immorality of millionaires, calls the number obscene. Paul Krugman blames a "rigged system."

None of this started with the IPO. Attacking Musk has been a fixture on the left for years, somewhere between a hobby and a second income. The trillion-dollar number raised the stakes. The objections write themselves and skip the question worth asking first. How did he get there?

Plenty of fortunes start with a dead grandparent and end in an offshore account. But this one came from hardware that lands itself and flies again. Musk bet on factories and launchpads while easy money chased apps. He keeps hours that would bury most executives. He sleeps on factory floors when a launch date slips, a habit his critics conveniently ignore.

And he paid everyday Americans in stock when cash would have cost him less, allowing them to win as well.

Before wheeling out the guillotine and inviting Mark Cuban to drop the blade, separate the fortunes built on extraction from the ones built on output. Musk is a visionary, a builder of truly great things. He made the rocket cheaper and the cook richer. Capitalism has never looked so hard to hate.