EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY!!!

ELON MUSK! VS! THE POPE!

BEGIN!!

Interesting that I heard that the 3 months severance that Musk stated he gave when cutting Twitter workforce hasn't been paid. Hmm, is this one of his promises or statements we can say he has decided isn't in the best interest of the new Twitter.

Don't care if it's a joke on Musk's part, Dmitry is a piece of shit Putin ass-licker who called Ukrainians cockroaches, is pro the illegal invasion of Ukraine and Musk is just casually joking around with him, fuck Musk, I really wonder how much shit he can keep saying before DoD/NSA starts to seriously question their military contracts with SpaceX.

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.

He's good to convince people to invest. That's pretty much everything he did the last decade. He just looked at who had great ideas, convinced people to invest in his plan to work on these ideas and employed the people who had these ideas. He's not the guy who as example had the idea for landing rockets, a hyperloop or anything. He just employed the guys who worked on it already years before just without the money so that they never managed to really build a big company. 

That's at least what I get from Elon Musk. Perfect in convincing enough people with money to invest in whatever he starts but nothing of it was really his ideas. It's people like Lars Backmore who have the awesome ideas, they just didn't manage to get the money Musk does. 

Too bad that people invest more in characters like Musk as in the ideas itself. Otherwise we would have a lot more successful projects with great minds behind it. But nobody cares about them...

Elon made it clear a year or two ago now that gen 2 sats and Starship will be required to keep things going and to get them to profitability sooner than later. Starship is a little behind, at least based on Elon's estimates, but he's always a year or two ahead, sometimes more, which is probably mostly hype and marketing on his part since that's the way it's been for like a decade now. So it's not like it hasn't been factored in. Starship will also send over double the amount of sats into orbit every launch, and each of those sats will also be much larger, more advanced, handling way more subscribers. Starship is also tied to the Moon missions and Mars eventually, so it has to work and in time or the entire space business and dream dies, besides launching other companies payloads.

Those 1M subs aren't all residential at $120. Some of that is business like air travel and cruise lines and they are paying way more and that's helping SpaceX cover some of the residential losses. Even Big box stores are starting to use Starlink as a backup, so they're paying for service at all times even though they only need it on rare occasions where they would lose even more money without it when the landline is down. There's also government and military contracts. Some of the near future Starlink network will be separate and called something else, Star whatever, and will be government and military only. That's going to make huge profits.

As for the launch costs, nobody knows exactly what the costs are for everything, but what is known is the typical costs are far less for SpaceX Starlink since they aren't charging themselves any extra for anything since there is no profit in that. They also have been shuttling more and more payload for customers instead of their own sats because it makes way more profit which can be used to offset the Starlink overhead and up front costs. The eventual profits are going towards the Moon the Mars missions anyway so both SpaceX and Starlink are working together to reduce prices as much as possible and asap.

Starlink also isn't a finalized product or service yet. It's still maturing and changes are being made on the fly. Having too many customers too early would actually hurt more than help. Which worked out great because it gave them time to work out major kinks in the system earlier on, minor kinks now, along with getting the dishy manufacturing up to par, and making newer more economical dishy designs. People have been waiting up to a year or more for their dishy to ship because there is such global demand for Starlink, and while Elon has improved production, there's still a long way to go. Not to mention the focus and all the free dishes he sent to Ukraine over the past year.

As for the sat network itself, it can handle way more than 1M users right now. Some people, mostly in the US, are complaining because their area is over subscribed, which is another issue to work out due to things like mobile Starlink, etc, but worldwide, there are so many more consumers who could be on the network who are simply waiting for their dishy or saving up to buy in.

Starlink sats are low earth orbit. Ping times are in the typical range of 30ms to 80ms. Gaming, even FPS, is totally doable. It's not for the most hardcore, but totally acceptable for the casual gamer. Speeds tend to be 75mbps on average. Light to medium rain and snow have little impact on speeds. Heavy rain and snow does slow speeds by quite a lot and can lead to total loss of connection. Anything less than hurricane winds isn't a problem either.

Blue Origin is far from launching sats. They're too busy charging millionaires and billionaires massive fee's for 5 mins of weightlessness in almost space.

China isn't close to launching sats either, and won't be able to offer their own service for much cheaper, so most people outside of China will purchase Starlink then anyway. That is 1.5 billion people though that Starlink wouldn't be getting as customers. Yet there is a Tesla factory in China because they caved to Elon's ownership demands, so it's not entirely impossible that Starlink will be blocked completely from China in the future.

The amount of rural consumers in the US alone who are waiting for Starlink is staggering. You've also got more and more people moving out of the big cities, and plenty of them and others would love to be living out in the woods, who don't, for reasons like poor to no internet. Starlink will and is changing that. Some countries, or states, etc, are buying up a bunch of dishes and giving them away to residents that apply, who only have old sat tech access or dial up landline. Some are even covering service costs for a time due to those residents being left behind for so long. You're likely going to see this happen more and more in the underdeveloped parts of the world.

Right now Starlink looks just fine. Nothing to really worry about. The majority of people interested in Starlink, don't care what Elon is doing with his other business ventures. They just want a reasonable internet connection that nobody else will offer them. Either that, or they've had enough of the local or big telecommunications monopoly and would simply rather get a similar or better internet service and give that money to Elon's SpaceX Starlink instead.

ConservagameR said:

Elon made it clear a year or two ago now that gen 2 sats and Starship will be required to keep things going and to get them to profitability sooner than later. Starship is a little behind, at least based on Elon's estimates, but he's always a year or two ahead, sometimes more, which is probably mostly hype and marketing on his part since that's the way it's been for like a decade now. So it's not like it hasn't been factored in. Starship will also send over double the amount of sats into orbit every launch, and each of those sats will also be much larger, more advanced, handling way more subscribers. Starship is also tied to the Moon missions and Mars eventually, so it has to work and in time or the entire space business and dream dies, besides launching other companies payloads.

Exactly that's the problem. Starlink is supposed to go up to 30k active satellites, and the V2 satellites are 5 times heavier than the old ones. SpaceX really needs to up the launch schedule if they want to get up to that number, especially with the heavier satellites, as they can only launch up to a dozen of them at once on a falcon 9, potentially even less depending on their size as the Falcon 9 fairing is fairly small. In other words, they need Starship asap unless they want to run into having more satellites failing than they can launch in time.

Those 1M subs aren't all residential at $120. Some of that is business like air travel and cruise lines and they are paying way more and that's helping SpaceX cover some of the residential losses. Even Big box stores are starting to use Starlink as a backup, so they're paying for service at all times even though they only need it on rare occasions where they would lose even more money without it when the landline is down. There's also government and military contracts. Some of the near future Starlink network will be separate and called something else, Star whatever, and will be government and military only. That's going to make huge profits.

I know, especially Starshield, which are for the military, will grant them some extra money - but those are also separate satellites that will need some time to recover the costs of launching them. And while the other you mentioned to bring in more money (assuming the stores didn't simply got a $120 kit, as that should be perfectly enough for most of them), they are few and far between, and their low number results in but a drop in the bucket.

As for the launch costs, nobody knows exactly what the costs are for everything, but what is known is the typical costs are far less for SpaceX Starlink since they aren't charging themselves any extra for anything since there is no profit in that. They also have been shuttling more and more payload for customers instead of their own sats because it makes way more profit which can be used to offset the Starlink overhead and up front costs. The eventual profits are going towards the Moon the Mars missions anyway so both SpaceX and Starlink are working together to reduce prices as much as possible and asap.

Commercial launches cost currently $67M, so I went with ~50M cost per launch, plus the satellites. I may be off, but I don't think it will be much lower than that.

Starlink also isn't a finalized product or service yet. It's still maturing and changes are being made on the fly. Having too many customers too early would actually hurt more than help. Which worked out great because it gave them time to work out major kinks in the system earlier on, minor kinks now, along with getting the dishy manufacturing up to par, and making newer more economical dishy designs. People have been waiting up to a year or more for their dishy to ship because there is such global demand for Starlink, and while Elon has improved production, there's still a long way to go. Not to mention the focus and all the free dishes he sent to Ukraine over the past year.

True, but every delay risks giving more time to the competition. And I don't just mean other satellite constellations here, but also terrestrial networks expanding into areas that would in turn make something like Starlink unnecessary for an increasing amount of clients, and the latter are generally much cheaper than Starlink.

As for the sat network itself, it can handle way more than 1M users right now. Some people, mostly in the US, are complaining because their area is over subscribed, which is another issue to work out due to things like mobile Starlink, etc, but worldwide, there are so many more consumers who could be on the network who are simply waiting for their dishy or saving up to buy in.

Starlink is mostly useful in rural areas. The US benefit by far the most from it, as most other developed countries (as in, countries where the general population has enough disposable income to spend on a monthly Starlink subscription) don't have nearly as many rural areas and they also often have better internet connection anyway, and they don't have quasi-monopolies who have carved up their state's terrestrial network into separate fiefdoms. As such, most clients will be Americans. Anecdotal, I know, but for instance, I live in a rural area and I could get much faster internet with a landline included for less than half the price (or just the internet for one third of the price), so Starlink is useless for me - and the same should be true for the vast majority of Europeans, Koreans or Japanese (Not sure about Canadians though). And while the US are a big market, it will not be enough long-term - and especially not nearly enough for the 1 billion subscribers target they announced at a press event.

Starlink sats are low earth orbit. Ping times are in the typical range of 30ms to 80ms. Gaming, even FPS, is totally doable. It's not for the most hardcore, but totally acceptable for the casual gamer. Speeds tend to be 75mbps on average. Light to medium rain and snow have little impact on speeds. Heavy rain and snow does slow speeds by quite a lot and can lead to total loss of connection. Anything less than hurricane winds isn't a problem either.

Yes, that's the advantage over geostationary or MEO internet constellations that are already in place, that they allow gaming. The transfer speed advantage is small so far (most of those are 50Mbit/s or up to 100 mbit/s, plenty enough for browsing, Youtube, Netflix and the like or even big downloads), so only the lower ping is what sets Starlink apart from those in a good way - but again at twice the cost or more. Plus in most of those cases, your satellite dish can also receive satellite television, which to my information the Starlink dishes can't do. And some of them (in a higher LEO orbing neccessing much les satellites) actually have only a ping of around 70-100, which is still very playable. 

Blue Origin is far from launching sats. They're too busy charging millionaires and billionaires massive fee's for 5 mins of weightlessness in almost space.

Blue Origin will take a while for sure, as does Samsung. But they're by far not the only competitors in the business.

OneWeb is already building their constellation with currently over 500 satellites operational (would have been much more if their launch partner hadn't been Roscosmos, so all launches got cancelled after the invasion of Ukraine and only 2 more launches happened since then), Viasat's constellation is also in a LEO and already in it's third generation and are also widely used for in-flight internet, O3b is on a MEO at 8000 km altitude, so the signal takes a bit longer (minimum ping of ~85, which is still playable, though mostly at 100+) but doesn't cover polar regions (neither does Starlink btw, at least so far), HughesNet is in GEO, so a long ping of 600+, but at twice the speeds of Starlink, And AST Spacemobile is trying to build satellites that can connect to standard cellphones and smartphones 'so no satellite phones necessary, your standard phone will do) instead of a satellite dish, allowing for reception anywhere without extra hardware, though no satellite has been launched yet.

In short, Starlink ain't alone on the market, far from it, and all the other are cheaper. This can make the current price unsustainable on the long run if they start to market more to potential customers.

China isn't close to launching sats either, and won't be able to offer their own service for much cheaper, so most people outside of China will purchase Starlink then anyway. That is 1.5 billion people though that Starlink wouldn't be getting as customers. Yet there is a Tesla factory in China because they caved to Elon's ownership demands, so it's not entirely impossible that Starlink will be blocked completely from China in the future.

Yeah, the chinese constellation is pretty much strictly for China. But if they ban Starlink for instance, possibly later down the road when their own constellation is getting operational, then that's a huge potential market lost.

The amount of rural consumers in the US alone who are waiting for Starlink is staggering. You've also got more and more people moving out of the big cities, and plenty of them and others would love to be living out in the woods, who don't, for reasons like poor to no internet. Starlink will and is changing that. Some countries, or states, etc, are buying up a bunch of dishes and giving them away to residents that apply, who only have old sat tech access or dial up landline. Some are even covering service costs for a time due to those residents being left behind for so long. You're likely going to see this happen more and more in the underdeveloped parts of the world.

Like I mentioned, there are many other options beside Starlink, and that the US will be the primary market as all the others combined will probably still be smaller. The reachable market is much smaller than you seem to think.

Right now Starlink looks just fine. Nothing to really worry about. The majority of people interested in Starlink, don't care what Elon is doing with his other business ventures. They just want a reasonable internet connection that nobody else will offer them. Either that, or they've had enough of the local or big telecommunications monopoly and would simply rather get a similar or better internet service and give that money to Elon's SpaceX Starlink instead.

It is fine because of so many investors having pumped billions into Starlink. If this dries up due to Elon's Shenenigans over at Twitter, Starlink may get into an liquidity issue before the constellation reaches it's full potential.

I do expect the number of clients to rise to about 5M relatively fast, but very slowly from there on out. Time will tell if this is gonna be enough to sustain Starlink or not.