-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25b (depending on bond length in years 2031,33,36,46 and 2056)
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
So huge amounts needed continuously.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo-spcx-stock-free-f...
They really need more price tiers and scale them by a better price differentiator: max gross weight or number of seats.
Starlink Aviation has 2 General Aviation tiers at $200/mo and $1,000/mo, 3 business tiers, $4000/mo, $12,500/mo, $20,000/mo, and negotiable “Fleet” pricing for commercial and government.
https://starlink.com/business/aviation?srsltid=AfmBOoqiIuBL1...
These use cases are approximately competing with SiriusXM weather, which has price tiers from $29.99/mo to $99.99/mo.
So the only moat I see (as a layman) is the speed and capacity. The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.
When it comes to internet, this IS the moat.
Why? Rich people flying private want to be connected and Starlink is the most reliable game in town. "Do you have Starlink?" is probably already being asked by those booking private.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1uklz4q/starlink_...
People first mentioned these fees at like $100... now you can go to Costco, grab a Starlink, and they'll randomly ask for $1,500 to actually start service.
Congestion is a thing when each node needs to go to space, but it also feels like they're cashing in on years of "just move to a cabin in the woods and work off Starlink"... once you've done that they have you by the balls even worse than a typical ISP.
Wanna guess if Starlink is advertising how insane these fees have gotten?
I tried it, and would you look at that, I was right.
I guess if you buy an entire house without checking to see what it costs to get internet service at that location, then you might be in a tough spot. Hard to blame it on anyone else though.
We aren't talking about people buying hoses now, these fees weren't there before, so it becomes a typical bait and switch. "Congestion charge" means the starlink network lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the areas that need it the most and where it was advertised the most.
https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/elon-musk-cha...
Jul 5, 2026The congestion charge was quietly added back in 2024, starting out as a one-time $100 fee, depending on location. By June 2025, that number grew to up to $1,000 in parts of the country, as PCMag reported at the time. As of last month, surcharges can hit $1,500.
This article is profoundly disturbing. The audacity to think the government has _allowed_ people to voluntarily purchase Internet service from a provider capable of servicing their geography. As if this is an assumption to be broken!
I’m sure glad my government has given me permission to purchase goods and services!
It's like everyone feels entitled to something they didn't know existed a few years ago.
If you are not big tech, that’s a lot of money. For the home in the middle of nowhere, $1500 could be more than you would pay in monthly rent. Plenty of rural people without access to good internet were hoping for Starlink to save them from garbage DSL connection options.
I can't wait until our urban cable-modem and DSL providers pick up those "congestion surcharge" ideas! (FCC tariffs prevent this, right?)
Look, friends of mine did this, they bought a country place so they can live the dream and write software in the sticks.
Next thing you know they're drilling new wells and installing a generator to support the fantasy while the bills pile up. When you bring modern conveniences to rural life it costs money.
Should a car company be allowed to charge you an extra fee every time you have a passenger?
This kind of behaviour does rather dampen the value proposition for such people.
Rural homes do have roads that can be reached on a rusty pickup.
If you live in a $300,000 home and pay $100/month for internet you’re paying 0.4% per year for the service.
If you own a $15,000,000 jet and pay $20,000/month for internet you’re paying 1.6% per year for the service.
By this comparison, we might say private jet owners are paying 4x more for their internet on their plane.
It’s worse if they are squeezing people in underserved rural areas… our monthly has gone down from €35 to €29 and still getting the same speed.
The second SpaceX offers direct-to-cell in our area we will switch to their service as we’ve never had any issues with it whereas the incumbent mobile/broadband providers regularly throttle even when we’re paying top tier prices.
Totally agree there needs to be more competition and preferably not from other billionaires … but until then, Starlink is great!
SpaceX has made the investments/innovation to better-serve the satellite internet market that already had players in it; HughesNet, Viasat, Iridium / Globalstar. Those were the price-gouging Oligopolist incumbents who Starlink is disrupting with a 10x better service for considerably cheaper.
Totally agree that SpaceX doubling the price from $10k/month to $20k looks really bad especially if they’re doing it to existing customers.
But the way I see this (as a non-private-jet-traveler) is: Starlink is doing a “Robin Hood” and making the Rich (who can all easily afford it) pay for the expansion of the service which will benefit all the rest of customers. And if the 0.01% decide to switch to an alternative supplier, that’s good for competition. So in a way it’s anti-monopolist. ;-)
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
I've tent camped a lot on forest service land (and BLM land) both out west and in the east. Generally having arrived there by human power. Not once have I been confronted with a situation where the internet would've added to my safety in any way whatsoever.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with being eaten by a bear, having a dangerous encounter with another person, or are at risk of being overrun by wildfire or flooding, a phone isn't likely to help much with the next 30 seconds of your possibly soon-to-be-abbreviated life. That's the risk you (and I) take by being out in the woods. You can't mitigate all or even much of that with technology.
Defence contracts are more likely than anything to be what keeps the satellites in orbit.
I'd argue it is going to go the other way. It is going to find more and more broad usage over time.
https://i.imgur.com/pagujRS.png
this is a map of the t-satellite coverage from the t-mobile coverage map, just the t-sat layer.
but it isn't just about harm, as i said "convenience". i like being able to download detailed maps for trail hiking on-demand, and being off-grid and still able to be working (as my job requires me to be online).
It isn't out of the question to have a major injury in a remote location.
But the fundamental problem would be being on your own in a remote location, not being unable to call 911.
Yes in your skating example, you "only" fell and shattered your femur.
But what if you fell and hit your head or landed and hit your spine ?
Or what if you had a heart attack ?
You would not be in a position to call 911 then, would you.
Being on your own in a remote location is not a risk problem that you can solve with any amount of technology.
I never said anything about being alone.
I would humbly suggest that you are moving the goalposts.
It was implied in your what-if post, i.e. "I fractured my femur in the skate park, but what if I was in a remote location".
You can also get cheap satellite dumb-phones with pay-as-you-go SIM cards. No need to be tied to a Starlink sub if your primary concern is about being able to summon help in an emergency in a remote location. All you need is your location and you can get that from any satellite dumb-phone.
Also with multiple humans there are other options. Unless you are somewhere truly remote, a casual walk a few minutes back down the trail will likely find you some other humans who can assist and summon help.
Stating the obvious but also in a remote location, 911 will not turn up instantly, so people in the group should have suitable training for remote first aid and be prepared to give it for an extended period whilst waiting for 911.
And please, when you go hiking, download and print all the maps you need before you depart, and share a detailed plan with somebody able to call help, including a time estimate where you will make contact.
As for work. Please just take time off and take a proper vacation. By being constantly on call you will burn out at a much faster rate.
If I'm living and traveling in my campervan for months on end, which is something I love to do, having starlink enables me to not have to plan. I can download the maps, hop out of my van and go. That's my own ideal freedom, I'm not tied to planning the same way you are.
> Please just take time off and take a proper vacation. By being constantly on call you will burn out at a much faster rate.
Wow, thanks for the advice. It is wild to me that you've got enough of an ego to say this to someone you don't know.
Because liquor stores get robbed sometimes, but they aren't usually found in the middle of a national forest.
starlink enables me to get the best of both worlds, which is a huge reason why i love it so much. don't knock it until you try it. =)
I think you can safely assume that everyone on this thread excluding you shares my bias.
You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.
If you had a choice between Fiber or Starlink, you’d choose Fiber.
So as traditional ISPs improve service and coverage, Starlink becomes less in demand.
Starlink would only make sense if the world was not getting more and more concentrated around densely populated areas.
Telcos manage many multiples of Starlink's traffic just fine over terrestrial high-bandwidth optic fiber.
Starlink has excellent military applications. The consumer business is a dishonest joke to fool investors.
It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.
I only get 10G per month of bandwidth but I rarely use it since I have a fiber connection that is mostly reliable.
It might be a grandfathered plan because they don't list it anywhere I can see:
- https://starlink.com/service-plans
- https://starlink.com/roam
https://starlink.com/na/support/article/37bb3b47-9525-7224-5...
And, apparently, I now have to reactivate the service to one of the published plans if I want to use more than low-speed data. Previously, I still had high-speed bandwidth for $10 a month just not a lot of it.
They must have changed things recently. And, now that I'm thinking about it, I probably skimmed an email that said something about this a month or two ago but, since the charge was staying at $10 a month, didn't pay much attention to the details.
I kinda wanted to get one of those for standby, but the price seemed too good to be true, so I figured they'd either eliminate it or raise the price.
A lot of open source software uses this model - free for everyone, but if you're a company that wants support then you have to pay for it, and that covers the development for everyone
Are you sure this is negotiable?
Price on things like kitchen appliances, furniture often negotiable - you just have to ask.
My wife: (good customer) if I guy two pairs of shoes I want 2nd pair at 50% - them "ok"
My wife: what will you give me if I buy this (expensive briefcase)? - them "$100 gift card"
I got an extra $150 of a sheepskin coat at a going out of business sale just by asking
On the one hand, sure, the unlimited aviation plans are targeting customers with lots of money. And they involve fancy, expensive-to-replace, FAA-approved hardware.
On the other hand, it’s sort of an easy market to target as such things go, and TAM is limited. In the areas where terrestrial radio for airplanes isn’t viable (rural areas and over water), there is a very low density of Internet user and satellite constellation that can cover the whole planet will have plenty of bandwidth.
Right now this is Starlink and, with MUCH lower available bandwidth and correspondingly lower pricing, Iridium. But Rocketlab is surely planning to grow Iridium and Amazon is planning to launch Leo soon. And there is still only so much aviation Internet money to go around.
So I think that SpaceX trying to juice profits on a small market that is only temporarily captive is a bad sign.
Then we could properly value the IPO in the quadrillions. (I know you know this is ridiculous. But investors clearly are riding high on the tulip mania).
Musk doesn't need to deliver to keep valuation up. We've seen him doing pretty well stringing people along indefinitely with "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" self driving capabilities.
A lot of their revenue is also from renting out GPUs to more productive AI companies, so depending on how long that game can keep on going (getting access to GPUs before other companies), it could last for a while too.
And they're likely out of national jurisdictions, so you can generate all the porn you want.
Technologically? Maaaaaybe a slight ping time reduction in certain configurations compared to terrestrial fiber, because even with multiple hops lasers can still be faster than fiber.
Super-expensive, questionably economic way to do it though.
Means also no protection from foreign actors.
No national jurisdiction is a two-edged sword
Both of which strike me as poor arguments. We are in a short term energy crunch. I expect within five years that most of the energy problems will be resolved and the eye watering financials of launching a GPU into space will look absurd
Governments also do not like to cede authority, so I find it hard to believe that they will not claim jurisdiction over any business operating within their borders (all of those ground stations).
Oh no, your power supply burned out Space: Welp, that entire data center node is dead now. Antarctica: OK, put a technician on a modified C-130.
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
I'd see this as an opportunity.
When companies buy a service, they normally agree a bespoke contract for 5 years or so and a fixed price for additional units, often with an option of a further x years period too.
So sounds like there wasn't a bespoke contract as lawyers should have picked it up.
If you are operating in North America for example, your service is going from $10k to $12.5k. Still a 25% increase, which is not fun, but I think a lot of the customers affected by this will fit into this category. You only need the $20k plan if your aircraft travels between their roughly-continental regions.
Nicholas Air, quoted in the article, appears to have no need for the $20k plan and should not use it.
He will extract as much as possible, whenever possible.
https://www.ft.com/content/3a023b95-66c3-41e1-b0ce-df752a499...
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.
These parts are likely pushing the best minds away from Musk these days. Not sure when that turned, perhaps Cybertruck?
Musk is good at getting money, he is not good at product design. Jobs had amazing taste, Musk has terrible taste. If Musk has a talent beyond raising money, it can be in making bold management moves, at least that's what I hear from CEOs that admire Musk. But I think in the past five years all the bold choices have not been so fantastic.
Cybertruck was when people started to see that the emperor had no clothes, i think.
ouch.
I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.
so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.
---
All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes
It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.
TBF that's like 70% of the US, large parts of the Southern Hemisphere in general, much of China, India, Russia, etc.
But yes, StarLink is best when it has some user density but not too much user density. It will be this way until... probably forever.
If I go camping? StarLink. Otherwise no cell/internet service.
A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?
There are a lot of places in and around the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains that have no service.
Note: I know a lot of rural ISPs serving these markets, or that have been trying to for decades - I know precisely when StarLink will work like crap or be great for the customer (given options at all).
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmazonLeo/comments/1uupd3w
will they offer aviation suitable plans?
Not everything has to be some little gripefest.
The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)
Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.
Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/archive/newsroom/cfpb-orders...
It does not work out of the box, you need to install an app, add a payment method, and sign up for a plan, free trial or not.
>you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive
Not sure what you mean by keeping a satellite alive, but you do need to pay for the service. There is no "Free" or "Pay as You Go" plan. Also, the Standby Mode $10/mo, not $5.
As for it being "extremely confusing", that's highly subjective so I won't comment, but it's definitely standard UI and I think it took me less than 8 clicks to first downgrade then cancel my plan.