That's an interesting point. There are many companies excited to use low-bandwith 5G connection to link up all their IoT devices. A satellite network provides

That's an interesting point. There are many companies excited to use low-bandwith 5G connection to link up all their IoT devices. A satellite network provides a means to route around the cell phone network, which could be valuable to Tesla if they think it's cheaper than buying data plans for their cars. It could also be an effective backup system in case cell networks are out of range or unavailable. I suppose the interesting questions are: how many individual ground stations will a single satellite be able to support simultaneously? And what are the physical characteristics of the ground station? (Iirc, in the early 2000's, Teledesic was going to use multiple motorized parabolic antennas enclosed in beach-ball sized plastic bubbles to track satellites as they went over. We can do that now without moving parts with beam steering, but the antennas might still be kind of bulky/awkward.)