Starlink added a million new customers in just the past month
According to a tweet by SpaceX yesterday, Starlink now has nine million active customers in 155 countries worldwide.
These numbers tell us the company is now getting more than a billion dollars per month in revenues, based on what it charges for its various plans. What make the numbers even more startling is how fast they are growing.
In a similar post from November 5, SpaceX said Starlink had 8 million customers, meaning that its customer base has expanded at a rate of more than 20,000 per day since that date.
At more than billion dollars per month, SpaceX essentially has about half the annual revenue of NASA, which it can use far more efficiently. And those numbers will only increase in the coming years, as the company opens up new markets worldwide and begins launching its upgraded Starlink satellites with Starship.
It still seems to me puzzling why, with these numbers, Musk is considering making the company public this coming summer. Though that move would bring in a gigantic amount of new investment capital from the stock sale, it would also subject the company to serious government regulation as a publicly-traded company. The Starlink revenue can only grow. Why add government interference when you can live without it?
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
According to a tweet by SpaceX yesterday, Starlink now has nine million active customers in 155 countries worldwide.
These numbers tell us the company is now getting more than a billion dollars per month in revenues, based on what it charges for its various plans. What make the numbers even more startling is how fast they are growing.
In a similar post from November 5, SpaceX said Starlink had 8 million customers, meaning that its customer base has expanded at a rate of more than 20,000 per day since that date.
At more than billion dollars per month, SpaceX essentially has about half the annual revenue of NASA, which it can use far more efficiently. And those numbers will only increase in the coming years, as the company opens up new markets worldwide and begins launching its upgraded Starlink satellites with Starship.
It still seems to me puzzling why, with these numbers, Musk is considering making the company public this coming summer. Though that move would bring in a gigantic amount of new investment capital from the stock sale, it would also subject the company to serious government regulation as a publicly-traded company. The Starlink revenue can only grow. Why add government interference when you can live without it?
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Totally off topic. But unlike the civilised world, in Sweden Christmas is celebrated on Christmas eve… ( Not in my apartment… It’s turkey and trimmings on the 25th!)
However, I would like to wish everyone a very happy Swedish ” God Jule “!
You go public so you can pay off the usual suspects related to people in government by allocation of friends and family stock and other tricks of the trade.
I’d like to make a comment about how cynical George’s response is, but I think he’s right.
My main gripe with the stock market is that companies only make money on the initial offering. The planned “initial bump” goes to the connected, not the general market or the company. What really torques me is that is by law. We cannot have widows and orphans buying stock on an IPO; the peons may actually get a cut of the action.
My assumption is that, if it happens at all, it will happen after Starship is caught, at least once.
I’m not fully clear on the answer to that question, either.
Now, when Eric Berger posted the link to his article offering an analysis of the “why,” Elon responded, “As usual, Eric is accurate.”
But even so, there are some lacunae in what Eric offers. So maybe his article is just a starting point. All I can assume is that given his bitterness over his experiences with Tesla as a public company, this is not a step he would take lightly.
Consider: SpaceX is going to be a major defense supplier. That’s going to be a lot of government control. I’d bet that future contracts are based on Musk allowing even more control. By becoming public for example.
I hope it’s just a spin-off of Starlink and/or Falcon, and not all of SpaceX. The shareholder’s needs are incompatible with Musk’s plans, and future society and government will be hostile.
Musk’s plans are grandiouse. From Berger’s piece at arstechnica, “will require about 1 million tons of supplies to be shipped to Mars to make a self-sustaining settlement. This is roughly 1,000 ships, and including refueling, at least 10,000 Starship launches. At $100 million per launch, that’s $1 trillion in launch costs alone.”
Starship may be more efficient and economical than anything government could do, but thousands of ships, infrastructure, and the contents aren’t cheap. Not to mention this AI space datacenter Starlink II project.
I think Starlink will get you Starships, but not a city on Mars or space AI. But then again, neither will selling out SpaceX.
I don’t really understand any of this dark speculation about the reason Elon is now planning to take SpaceX public. He’s been pretty clear about why – he intends to aggressively pursue construction of AI data centers in space as building comparable capability on the ground is subject to too many delays and limits. This will apparently require 10’s of billions he can lay hands on most quickly by taking SpaceX public. Relying on Starlink profits, big as they are and growing as fast as they are, would, it seems, not allow for maximum speed toward the AI data centers in space project. Speed is apparently of the essence to insure that Elon, and not someone else, steers the future of AI. He decided some time ago that the future of AI is too important to leave in the hands of people like Larry Page, who has expressed indifference to the future survival of the human race, or Sam Altman, who is an amoral grifter.
Elon intends to begin this AI data centers in space project via piggyback payloads on Starlink V3 sats. But he also intends to manufacture and deploy still more capable AI data centers by industrializing the Moon. Doing this, at the needed scale, is pretty obviously not going to be a nickle-and-dime proposition. This is what he needs the big pile of cash for in fairly short order, to build out Starship-related infrastructure on Earth even more extensively than previously planned so that lunar industrialization is able to proceed at maximum throttle, and then to fund that industrialization.
The experience of public company CEO-ship, with Tesla, has been painful at times, but also educational. I’m sure Elon already has ways in the works for SpaceX to avoid the worst of the bumps he experienced with Tesla by virtue of its publicly-traded status.
There are other possibilities on going public that may be off the radar of most here. There was an old joke about some guy inventing a 100 mile per gallon carburetor but the oil companies bought it to keep it off the market. The joke concludes with it was actually the Japanese and they were selling it back to us 5 miles at a time.
While the joke is seriously dated, it does illustrate a business strategy. This “going public” is a very small portion of the company. The stocks involved could easily be jumped up to outrageous values in a fairly short period of time. Investors that missed out on this offering could be drooling about the second round with an even more lucrative result. Many years from now, it is possible that several rounds of offerings could have raised an amount of ready cash that is hard to imagine right now.
Depending on a bunch of corporate factors I’m not qualified to comment on, enough control might remain to maintain direction even with far less directly owned shares. Somewhat similar to me driving a company truck and haven’t had a personal vehicle in decades. No one else drives the company truck or uses my company phone so I retain control, though technically not by direct ownership
My understanding of the word “revenue” is that it’s gross intake. Not profit. Doesn’t cover outgo, taxes etc.
NASA’s monthly “revenue” is tax free and pretty much there to spend. So I’m not sure the two monthly numbers are comparable.
Elon has a big project in mind and he wants it in place – fast. This will require BIG money, acquired quickly.
Indications are this project is much larger than Starlink – it’s the Internet 2.0
Here’s a nice reference to this larger project by JCristina on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0LhrdwiBqw
An IPO will prove complex, but it also offers some safety from bureaucrats, and zealots. If they try to mess with millions of investors, they (bureaucrats) will get a lot of, well financed, push back. Elon will no longer be the sole target, with millions of investment partners surrounding him.
Merry christmas to you guys as well.
Robert asked: “It still seems to me puzzling why, with these numbers, Musk is considering making the company public this coming summer. Though that move would bring in a gigantic amount of new investment capital from the stock sale, it would also subject the company to serious government regulation as a publicly-traded company. The Starlink revenue can only grow. Why add government interference when you can live without it?”
OK, let’s look at what this Starlink news means for that possible IPO.
At the current subscriber-ship, it would take Starlink about three years to raise as much as the expected IPO would. but how fast does SpaceX expect to spend its IPO revenue? Certainly not in the first month. Probably not even the first year. If it would take three years to spend that much money on the various projects, then the IPO is useless.
And how fast is Starling increasing? A million a month, or 12% per month. By summertime, 2026, we could expect Starlink to be bringing in revenue at the rate of another $6 billion annually, and by the end of the year SpaceX may not be able to spend money as fast as it is coming in from Starlink, much less spend an IPO’s revenue.
I doubt that SpaceX will do that IPO. I think that Starlink is doing much better than SpaceX thought it would when they initiated the project, and this windfall may be largely due to the late arrival of the competition. Starlink’s early rollout has allowed it to be the market leader, and that has been a successful strategy for many companies for decades, if not centuries.
Among the problems with going public is that the company becomes responsible for benefitting the public investor. Big risks are discouraged, even forbidden. This requirement to demonstrate that the company is benefitting the shareholders is one of the big reasons why American companies are pressured to show quarterly profits at the expense of higher long-term profits.
Starlink is a nice side hustle for SpaceX and the Falcon 9 platform but not the prize at this point. Starlink is the dial up modem version of the internet by comparison to what coming.
SpaceX via Super Heavy is going after a space-based AI data center model – solar powered, space cooled, and Nvidia AI tech based data centers, which are no longer tied to land. It’s the next major phase of the internet and it will be a startling change.
The IPO will very likely happen as it’s been declared publicly and SpaceX will expand, even more, it’s market share of space based technologies.
Starlink is not the side hustle. It is the driving force behind everything.
It pays for each and every launch of its satellites. It will pull in close to a billion dollars a month in profit to spend on expansion.
The smart move would be to keep starlink running and start to replace them with updated sats that also act as data centers. Not truly anything AI. AI is a buzz word to drag in the support of the youth who think anything with AI attached is better. Everything AI is just algorithm assisted, Not some intelligence.