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I'm guessing it's a sacrifice he's willing to make towards his goal, especially since he has other ventures such as SpaceX which if I had to guess has more pote

I'm guessing it's a sacrifice he's willing to make towards his goal, especially since he has other ventures such as SpaceX which if I had to guess has more potential value than an electric car company when there are a bunch other car companies getting into the game. There are a lot less rocket companies with comparable experience.

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LargeWu 2y ago
This implies it's intentional, that there's some sort of master plan. I don't think that's it. I think he's just intoxicated by the prospect of basically unlimited power and is unable to think rationally about the entire situation.
- RandomBacon 2y ago
  I don't think it implies that it's intentional.
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Soonish he will own one of the biggest ISPs in the world (Starlink). Hes going to have a consumer monopoly on cube sats and a lot of the worlds bandwidth in places that dont have other options (much of the world). I thibk Tesla eas just a scam or means to an end to acconplish his other goals.. One app for everything/mega corp or whatever.
- philjohn 2y ago
  Will he? From reading some sources it looks like as more customers are added the bandwidth just isn't there. Part of that is apparently not enough earth stations, but there's a saturation point where they can't add more satellites. They already limit signups in oversubscribed areas, and as good as starlink is, it's still a technology that has higher latency, and higher ongoing costs from what I can see. Meanwhile, once fibre is in the ground, with PON there's very little maintenance required. And upgrading speeds is a case of upgrading the OLT and ONT's - I'm going out on a limb and guessing that's much cheaper to do than launching thousands of upgraded satellites.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    > there's a saturation point where they can't add more satellites. Which they are not even close to yet. Starship is about launching the suckers in bulk.
    - philjohn 2y ago
      I didn't even get onto the power requirements for end user equipment - according to Jeff Geerling, it looks like about 80-90 watts. My FTTP ONT is using less than 2. That's 788kWh per year ((90 * 24 * 365) / 1000) and at 25p per kWh that's an extra £197.10 of energy usage per year. Compared to £4.38 for my FTTP ONT. It's cool tech, no doubt, but it's not a replacement for a fibre connection by any stretch of the imagination, and so the positing that it'll be the, or one of the, bigget ISP's in the world seems off base, most likely by an order of magnitude or more.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  In what sense is it one of the largest ISPs in the world? It would appear to have revenue of about 8bn, which would put it towards the bottom of the top 50 telecoms.
  - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    Well they came into the top 50 in 5 years with half their infra in space. They claim their v2 sats will increase network capacity 10x (who knows if this is true) but they are moving with extreme velocity. They are also insuring their own regulatory moat via the Trump administration, they have no real competition in the constellation space, all this combined with Elon having an extereme ambition to control the levers of society... I dont think my predictions is unwarranted, however, we will see.
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adamc 2y ago
The market seems much smaller, though.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
See I don't believe that per se, he could have had both; were he to stop putting all R&D into infeasible money sinks like autopilot (which he had promised / upsold people to, so scrapping it would've led to multi billion lawsuits) and meme / prestige projects like Cybertruck and instead pushed more into making electric cars affordable, AND if tesla expanded and opened up / expanded the supercharger + solar panel + battery network, it would've been a fine multi billion dollar company with longevity - especially the infrastructure stuff would be long term revenue. SpaceX is narrow; specialized, high revenue per launch, but not that many launches (although they're doing more than any other company), whereas tesla is broad, no longer unique but potentially big volume of car sales and recurring revenue from infrastructure and maintenance, could have been a competitor to GE and the like.

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LargeWu 2y ago

This implies it's intentional, that there's some sort of master plan. I don't think that's it. I think he's just intoxicated by the prospect of basically unlimited power and is unable to think rationally about the entire situation.

RandomBacon 2y ago
I don't think it implies that it's intentional.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

Soonish he will own one of the biggest ISPs in the world (Starlink). Hes going to have a consumer monopoly on cube sats and a lot of the worlds bandwidth in places that dont have other options (much of the world). I thibk Tesla eas just a scam or means to an end to acconplish his other goals.. One app for everything/mega corp or whatever.

philjohn 2y ago
Will he? From reading some sources it looks like as more customers are added the bandwidth just isn't there. Part of that is apparently not enough earth stations, but there's a saturation point where they can't add more satellites. They already limit signups in oversubscribed areas, and as good as starlink is, it's still a technology that has higher latency, and higher ongoing costs from what I can see. Meanwhile, once fibre is in the ground, with PON there's very little maintenance required. And upgrading speeds is a case of upgrading the OLT and ONT's - I'm going out on a limb and guessing that's much cheaper to do than launching thousands of upgraded satellites.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  > there's a saturation point where they can't add more satellites. Which they are not even close to yet. Starship is about launching the suckers in bulk.
  - philjohn 2y ago
    I didn't even get onto the power requirements for end user equipment - according to Jeff Geerling, it looks like about 80-90 watts. My FTTP ONT is using less than 2. That's 788kWh per year ((90 * 24 * 365) / 1000) and at 25p per kWh that's an extra £197.10 of energy usage per year. Compared to £4.38 for my FTTP ONT. It's cool tech, no doubt, but it's not a replacement for a fibre connection by any stretch of the imagination, and so the positing that it'll be the, or one of the, bigget ISP's in the world seems off base, most likely by an order of magnitude or more.
rsynnott 2y ago
In what sense is it one of the largest ISPs in the world? It would appear to have revenue of about 8bn, which would put it towards the bottom of the top 50 telecoms.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Well they came into the top 50 in 5 years with half their infra in space. They claim their v2 sats will increase network capacity 10x (who knows if this is true) but they are moving with extreme velocity. They are also insuring their own regulatory moat via the Trump administration, they have no real competition in the constellation space, all this combined with Elon having an extereme ambition to control the levers of society... I dont think my predictions is unwarranted, however, we will see.

deleted 2y ago

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adamc 2y ago

The market seems much smaller, though.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

See I don't believe that per se, he could have had both; were he to stop putting all R&D into infeasible money sinks like autopilot (which he had promised / upsold people to, so scrapping it would've led to multi billion lawsuits) and meme / prestige projects like Cybertruck and instead pushed more into making electric cars affordable, AND if tesla expanded and opened up / expanded the supercharger + solar panel + battery network, it would've been a fine multi billion dollar company with longevity - especially the infrastructure stuff would be long term revenue. SpaceX is narrow; specialized, high revenue per launch, but not that many launches (although they're doing more than any other company), whereas tesla is broad, no longer unique but potentially big volume of car sales and recurring revenue from infrastructure and maintenance, could have been a competitor to GE and the like.