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The Starlink Problem
Things don’t quite look right.
SpaceX is going public in a matter of weeks, which means they have filed an S1, a document that lets us finally see some of the company’s murky financial machinations. There are a tonne of revelations to be found in here — that is, once you get past the painful levels of hollow hype that come across as desperation more than vision. One revelation is about Starlink, as this S1 paints it as the crown jewel of SpaceX, not just because it is the only profitable division of SpaceX, but because it seems to suggest Starlink will dominate the internet provider market. I have even talked to people who want to invest in SpaceX’s ludicrously overvalued IPO just to get a slice of the Starlink pie. But sadly, when you look at the numbers and their actual meaning, this narrative totally falls apart.
Let’s start with the 2026 Q1 figures for Starlink as laid out by this S1 filing. Starlink had a total of 10.3 million paying users, just over double the number they had this time last year, with each paying an average of $66 per month (a sharp fall from $99 a month in 2023), generating $3.26 billion in revenue and $1.19 billion in operational profit.
The fact that Starlink is profitable at all is utterly remarkable. For years, Starlink was wildly unprofitable, and thanks to the fact that its satellites only last a few years…
