Ehhhhhh is it? The costs of it are immense, and the market for it really isn’t. Starlink is being hugely subsidised, and the cost of maintaining the network hasn’t fully come into play yet. Due to orbital decay, the sats coming back down after a few years when they run out of fuel, Starlink will run into the red queen paradox in about 18 months to 2 years. That’s where they need to run as fast as they can, just to stay in the same place. Every new stattelite will be a direct replacement.
And currently, Starlink is NOT profitable. They’re reporting a profit, but that’s a bookkeeping trick. They’re putting up new satellites as an investment, when a fair chunk of them are just operating costs. Eventually, their total “growth investment” will be operating costs, it will be a mandatory expense.
Starlink inherently scales very poorly. If you want to add 1 extra connection in a city with 20 million people, you need to add 1 extra connection for every spot on the entire planet, and the planet is mostly water without anyone using the network. So we have a network that can’t grow in places where people live, competing with vastly cheaper alternatives that have vastly lower upkeep costs.
**Just a little breakdown of their finances: **
They made 8.1 billion in 2024. That includes 2b in government contracts, and 1.97 (call it 2b) in hardware sales and accesories. So that’s 4.1b in subscribtions.
They launched 1923 satellites . That means they will HAVE TO launch 1923 sats to keep up the network. Let’s believe their best estimate and say each v1 sat one costs 250k and each v2 mini costs 750k (estimate, it’s tripple the size of a v1, ignoring inflation and tariffs entirely), and that each launch is 30m, half of what they charge externally (probably much higher, but eh).
So, with 4.1b income, they’re spending 3.5b just on maintaining the orbital network at the absolute most optimistic pricing, leaving 600 million. They employ about 750 people, lets say those each cost 150k (meaning they earn ~75k, which is a bargain!), down to 485m. Just the power use alone of groundstations alone (4m users times 20 watts at 5 cents per kWh) is another 35m, and that’s probably hugely underestimating it.
Out of that remaining 450m they have to pay for their ground equipment and infrastructure, their offices and cars and executives, and of course a fuckton of data. And these numbers are all hugely kind to SpaceX. And of course, none of this includes interest payments. Lets say they actually turned a 100m profit on a 4b expense. That’s 2.5%.
You might as well open a supermarket. Hell, I can make a 2.5% profit just by putting money into my savingsaccount. I can make a 6% by buying S&P500 ETFs. That’s the kind of longterm profit you’re looking at from running Starlink.
Ehhhhhh is it? The costs of it are immense, and the market for it really isn’t. Starlink is being hugely subsidised, and the cost of maintaining the network hasn’t fully come into play yet. Due to orbital decay, the sats coming back down after a few years when they run out of fuel, Starlink will run into the red queen paradox in about 18 months to 2 years. That’s where they need to run as fast as they can, just to stay in the same place. Every new stattelite will be a direct replacement.
And currently, Starlink is NOT profitable. They’re reporting a profit, but that’s a bookkeeping trick. They’re putting up new satellites as an investment, when a fair chunk of them are just operating costs. Eventually, their total “growth investment” will be operating costs, it will be a mandatory expense.
Starlink inherently scales very poorly. If you want to add 1 extra connection in a city with 20 million people, you need to add 1 extra connection for every spot on the entire planet, and the planet is mostly water without anyone using the network. So we have a network that can’t grow in places where people live, competing with vastly cheaper alternatives that have vastly lower upkeep costs.
**Just a little breakdown of their finances: **
They made 8.1 billion in 2024. That includes 2b in government contracts, and 1.97 (call it 2b) in hardware sales and accesories. So that’s 4.1b in subscribtions.
They launched 1923 satellites . That means they will HAVE TO launch 1923 sats to keep up the network. Let’s believe their best estimate and say each v1 sat one costs 250k and each v2 mini costs 750k (estimate, it’s tripple the size of a v1, ignoring inflation and tariffs entirely), and that each launch is 30m, half of what they charge externally (probably much higher, but eh).
So, with 4.1b income, they’re spending 3.5b just on maintaining the orbital network at the absolute most optimistic pricing, leaving 600 million. They employ about 750 people, lets say those each cost 150k (meaning they earn ~75k, which is a bargain!), down to 485m. Just the power use alone of groundstations alone (4m users times 20 watts at 5 cents per kWh) is another 35m, and that’s probably hugely underestimating it.
Out of that remaining 450m they have to pay for their ground equipment and infrastructure, their offices and cars and executives, and of course a fuckton of data. And these numbers are all hugely kind to SpaceX. And of course, none of this includes interest payments. Lets say they actually turned a 100m profit on a 4b expense. That’s 2.5%.
You might as well open a supermarket. Hell, I can make a 2.5% profit just by putting money into my savingsaccount. I can make a 6% by buying S&P500 ETFs. That’s the kind of longterm profit you’re looking at from running Starlink.
The objective of Starlink is literally to prevent people from seeing stars.