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It's not the number of terminals that is relevant it is the total $. If the buyer pays $100m and receives 100 terminals with retail price $5m there is zero char
by foobarqux 3y ago
It's not the number of terminals that is relevant it is the total $. If the buyer pays $100m and receives 100 terminals with retail price $5m there is zero charity, it doesn't matter if you label 99 terminals as "donated" except for PR purposes.
> ... 70% of the service costs were being borne by SpaceX.
That's Musk's completely made up number for the price of the service ($4500/month). By that logic he could have said it was $10000/month and therefore been "donating" even more. That price 1. isn't the cost of providing the service; 2. isn't the retail price of the service, 3. isn't a reasonable mark up on the retail price.
- dotnet00 3y agoYou're making an unfalsifiable argument by dumping the reasonable assumption that when SpaceX talks about things like terminal and service costs it's using the same price baselines. Especially since if they're reporting to the Pentagon and intend to get them to pay by reason of unreasonable financial burden for SpaceX, they would want to make it look like it's costing them more, which would not be the case if we go with your unsupported suggestion that they're charging extremely high rates to government compared to how they're pricing their donations.
- foobarqux 3y ago> ... your unsupported suggestion that they're charging extremely high rates to government I did support it by linking to a CNN article which cites what government officials say they were paying (hundreds of millions of dollars per year) as well as Musk's own claims about the service price. Look this is very simple: Musk receives a certain amount of money from providing service and terminals in Ukraine (hundreds of millions of dollars a year). You claim that this is substantially less than what it costs to provide those terminals and services (even in a war-zone) which is absurd.