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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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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.
I don't disagree that even starlink is overvalued, my point was that it's the only thing in spacex bringing in profit and why.
FWIW, their v3 satellite model is apparently a 10x bandwidth increase over v2 (although weights about 5x as much). At the moment they are so oversubscribed that they can charge a $1000 surcharge for people to just sign up in some areas, so there's definitely demand. So given they're already around 10 mill subscribers there is some growth to be had (although I agree it won't be 100s of millions, maybe a few 10s - far from the 50+ multiplier on the valuation, even ignoring the other 2 money pits bundled in)
That being said, you're entirely correct that fixing the on-ground infrastructure is a much better investment if the goal is good internet service and would deliver a better quality service for cheaper, but that is happening extremely slowly in most of the developed countries (e.g. UK has terrible internet infra as well), especially in rural areas. So for the next 10 years starlink doss have a large market because the ground infrastructure sucks, and it's not "hype" to spend money on it for investors where's space stuff is.
It gets even worse.
From this article from early 2025, we get a median life for Starlink satellites of 5.3 years, though expected to improve with newer versions of the satellites.
From other more broad analysis of the life expectancy of low orbit satellites we get that the solar cycle - which is 11 years - means that at its peak many more such satellites die due to the Earth's athmosphere expanding (so the satellites are more impacted by athmospheric drag hence are less likely to manage to remain in orbit, which they do using engines which have limited propellant). This is in addition to normal hazards of space, such as failures due to solar activity.
So expect that even for the lastest generation, half-life of these satellites is between 5 to at best 11 years.
Deutsche Telekom does not have the capital costs of replacing half its network every 5 - 11 years.