Twitter is now X

[Bofferbrauer2]

Ryuu96 said:

TallSilhouette said:

https://i.imgur.com/zP0pX5T.png

Moron didn't even remove Twitter.

When it comes to anything outside of SpaceX or Tesla he's absolutely braindead.

And even there, things start to crumble. Problems at Tesla Gigafactories with rebelling workers and technical problems with their cars, while SpaceX had to delay 2 Falcon 9 launches in a row (which was unheard of before), Starship getting delayed, Starlink being denied as broadband by the FCC because of too low bitrates, the last Starlink launch was supposed to be the new second gen satellites but were mostly still the much slower (and much smaller) 1.5 gen...

Seriously, Starlink is gonna bleed SpaceX dry at this pace, which everybody with just a passing knowledge of global economy could see coming from a mile away. (Warning: Incoming rant)

There have been 67 launches so far and they just passed 1M subscribers. The satellite dishes cost more to manufacture than what the users pay for, so basically the first 6-8 months payments are to recoup that cost at a monthly rate of $120. $120 is quite a lot for third world and even developing countries, so only the rich in those regions have enough disposable income to actually afford Starlink, while in most developed countries, there are faster options available at a lower price. This seriously limits the possible amount of clients worldwide to maybe 300M, and that's a very generous estimation - but at fundraisers they casually throw numbers around of over 1 billion future clients, which is totally unrealistic.

With 1M subscribers at $120, it's just enough to fund 2 launches per month onboard a Falcon 9 rocket, disregarding any other costs like that of the satellites themselves, the dishes for the customers, employees or R&D. But SpaceX tends to send 3-4 rockets with Starlink satellites into space every month, continuously draining the capital at hand and needing endless rounds of fundraisers to keep them afloat. And the next-gen satellites are 5 times (Falcon 9/heavy) to 8 times (Srarship) heavier and bulkier than the current satellites, so you can send much less of them at once into space. Add to this increasing competition (Oneweb, Blue Origin, Samsung all announced their own constellation, and China wants it's own constellation to avoid their people circumventing the Firewall of China through them) and those that were there already before Starlink (mostly slower and on geostationary orbits, which don't have as big of a bandwidth and a ping of ~650, so unsuitable for online gaming, but good enough for YouTube or Netflix), and the number of potential customers shrinks rapidly.

10% of all the Starlink Satellites sent into space are already out of order, most of them deorbited already (3666 in total, 3374 still in orbit, 3335 in working condition). Only about 80% of the satellites are actually operational (3063), meaning that SpaceX will have to increase the cadence of their launches just to keep their constellation in place the more they expand the fleet. It's been estimated that with the full constellation in place, Starlink would need at least 50M subscribers at $120 just to keep the company afloat. Increasing the prices is not much of an option as like mentioned earlier, in most countries there are options that are both faster and cheaper, and would further shrink the pool of potential clients. And the reputation he's building at Twitter will probably hurt sales from people who don't want to have anything to do with Elon anymore as a result of this whole debacle.

/r

Btw, do you know that Musk didn't create Tesla? He just got onboard very early by being by far the biggest investor into the new company (6.4 out of 7.5 millions) and then won a lawsuit that allowed him (and two other dudes) to call himself founder of Tesla while two completely unrelated persons started it all - but now it has 5 founders legally speaking.