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Tesla and SpaceX are political organizations basing their revenues off political trends Tesla: Climate change political trend SpaceX: Defense/National Pride p

Tesla and SpaceX are political organizations basing their revenues off political trends Tesla: Climate change political trend SpaceX: Defense/National Pride political trend Organic exports, investments and consumption would not be benefiting such companies, the big winners would be the real bona fide and non-political companies I already mentioned: Apple, Microsoft, Exxon, JPM, Google, Amazon, Walmart. Meaning the stuff that people use daily as opposed to only reading about it in the tech and the financial press as aspirational goals after billions of dollars in subsidies and govt. contracts

terafo 4y ago
You are plainly wrong. Out of 50 Falcon 9 launches this year only 3 had DoD payloads.
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  > You are plainly wrong. Out of 50 Falcon 9 launches this year only 3 had DoD payloads. If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink. In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.
  - avmich 4y ago
    > Regular people aren't using SpaceX Yes, you're plainly wrong. All Starlink customers may point to why. The point doesn't seem to stand?
  - terafo 4y ago
    Regular people aren't buying ASML equipment either. Aren't customers of Maersk. Wouldn't buy A330. They benefit from their products every day, though. And yeah, regular people are increasingly using Starlink, especially in my country. Turns out even good fiber infrastructure is quite vulnerable.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    I pay SpaceX $110 a month for the best satellite internet service I have ever used. Even if the world was 90% urbanized with high speed fiber in 90% of homes, which is nowhere close to being true by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people, nevermind the use cases for intercontinental travel and domestic travel (the service is already better than 4G and competitive with 5G average speeds @ 100+ Mbps). Also, at 100+Mbps, this is the first generation of the technology. Is it feasible that they hit 1Gpbs by end of decade? I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
    - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
      > by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        I'd take the "hell freezing over" side of that bet. He's already providing 10s of millions worth of internet service for free to Ukrainians. Do they count as poor? Starlink satellites spend a lot of time flying over Africa. And if it's priced at $110/month it will not see a lot of use. So for a very low marginal cost he can provide a very valuable service. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if somebody talks him into giving it away for the next cause du jour, especially if its structured so he only gives away the service (low marginal cost) and not the terminals (high marginal cost).
      - chrisco255 4y ago
        No I am not. The "90% urbanized" figure was just thrown out there. Let's not debate urban vs. rural because even in the U.S. nowhere close to 90% of people have gigabit internet speeds or 5G availability. The addressable market for Starlink in US alone is likely 50-80 million people. DirecTV and Dish Network alone have over 30 million U.S. customers combined. Keep in mind Starlink has been engineered for portability unlike DirecTV and Dish. More than 11 million families own an RV. And 12 million own registered boats. How many own second homes? Starlink takes 2 minutes to setup and 2 minutes to tear down. Back to residential service though. There are tens of millions of households that are limited by old copper lines that were never filled in or cable extensions that were never dug. Or if the cable does exist, it's still at slower speeds and certainly not gigabit. Relying on mobile isn't a great option as most services today still throttle speeds down to 600 kbps when exceeding 15GB a month (which is nothing these days). But worldwide, including in all the BRICS countries and the global south that rapidly growing in GDP and global importance is about 2-3 billion people with varying levels of spotty, congested, unreliable internet. These communities are probably lucky if they have 4G in many cases. That market is worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades, even when adjusting for purchasing power. Easily. And your assumptions about relative competitiveness vs the highest quality residential speeds (which are only largely available to people in dense urban cores) are perhaps one upgrade away from being achieved. They already solved the hardest problem with regards to satellite communication: latency. It will be interesting to see how far they can push the bandwidth at scale over the years.
  - shytey 4y ago
    As of June 2022 Starlink had 500,000 "regular people" customers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
    - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
      Given their prices I guarantee you they aren't regular people. Also 500k is a rounding error for T-Mobile , AT&T, Comecast etc.
      - chrisco255 4y ago
        Its $110 a month. I spend 1/5th of that every time I go to Chipotle.

terafo 4y ago

You are plainly wrong. Out of 50 Falcon 9 launches this year only 3 had DoD payloads.

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
> You are plainly wrong. Out of 50 Falcon 9 launches this year only 3 had DoD payloads. If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink. In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.
- avmich 4y ago
  > Regular people aren't using SpaceX Yes, you're plainly wrong. All Starlink customers may point to why. The point doesn't seem to stand?
- terafo 4y ago
  Regular people aren't buying ASML equipment either. Aren't customers of Maersk. Wouldn't buy A330. They benefit from their products every day, though. And yeah, regular people are increasingly using Starlink, especially in my country. Turns out even good fiber infrastructure is quite vulnerable.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I pay SpaceX $110 a month for the best satellite internet service I have ever used. Even if the world was 90% urbanized with high speed fiber in 90% of homes, which is nowhere close to being true by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people, nevermind the use cases for intercontinental travel and domestic travel (the service is already better than 4G and competitive with 5G average speeds @ 100+ Mbps). Also, at 100+Mbps, this is the first generation of the technology. Is it feasible that they hit 1Gpbs by end of decade? I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
  - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    > by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      I'd take the "hell freezing over" side of that bet. He's already providing 10s of millions worth of internet service for free to Ukrainians. Do they count as poor? Starlink satellites spend a lot of time flying over Africa. And if it's priced at $110/month it will not see a lot of use. So for a very low marginal cost he can provide a very valuable service. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if somebody talks him into giving it away for the next cause du jour, especially if its structured so he only gives away the service (low marginal cost) and not the terminals (high marginal cost).
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      No I am not. The "90% urbanized" figure was just thrown out there. Let's not debate urban vs. rural because even in the U.S. nowhere close to 90% of people have gigabit internet speeds or 5G availability. The addressable market for Starlink in US alone is likely 50-80 million people. DirecTV and Dish Network alone have over 30 million U.S. customers combined. Keep in mind Starlink has been engineered for portability unlike DirecTV and Dish. More than 11 million families own an RV. And 12 million own registered boats. How many own second homes? Starlink takes 2 minutes to setup and 2 minutes to tear down. Back to residential service though. There are tens of millions of households that are limited by old copper lines that were never filled in or cable extensions that were never dug. Or if the cable does exist, it's still at slower speeds and certainly not gigabit. Relying on mobile isn't a great option as most services today still throttle speeds down to 600 kbps when exceeding 15GB a month (which is nothing these days). But worldwide, including in all the BRICS countries and the global south that rapidly growing in GDP and global importance is about 2-3 billion people with varying levels of spotty, congested, unreliable internet. These communities are probably lucky if they have 4G in many cases. That market is worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades, even when adjusting for purchasing power. Easily. And your assumptions about relative competitiveness vs the highest quality residential speeds (which are only largely available to people in dense urban cores) are perhaps one upgrade away from being achieved. They already solved the hardest problem with regards to satellite communication: latency. It will be interesting to see how far they can push the bandwidth at scale over the years.
- shytey 4y ago
  As of June 2022 Starlink had 500,000 "regular people" customers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
  - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    Given their prices I guarantee you they aren't regular people. Also 500k is a rounding error for T-Mobile , AT&T, Comecast etc.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Its $110 a month. I spend 1/5th of that every time I go to Chipotle.