Elon Musk’s SpaceX Endgame
· The Atlantic
If Elon Musk gets his way, space will soon look very different. Through his ownership of SpaceX, the world’s richest man already operates most of the roughly 14,000 active satellites that are orbiting Earth. Now his rocket company is asking the government for permission to launch up to 1 million more. It’s part of Musk’s plan to build data centers in space that can harness the power of the sun for AI. “You’re power-constrained on Earth,” Musk said last month. “Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.”
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Musk has a lot riding on these orbital data centers. To help finance them, he is set to take SpaceX public as early as June, at a reported valuation of $2 trillion. Musk has claimed that data centers in space can “enable self-growing bases on the moon, an entire civilization on Mars, and ultimately expansion to the universe.” It’s all classic Musk, who has a habit of making big promises that he can’t always keep. Data centers in space are an untested technology, and it’s not clear if they’d actually work. (Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment.)
Even if Musk falls short of his lofty space dreams, his venture may still pay him considerable dividends. That’s because it could help him secure regulatory approval to accelerate a land grab in space. There are only so many satellites that can circle Earth’s low orbit before the risk of collision becomes unacceptably high. By flooding space with his own satellites, Musk can make it impossible for other companies to gain entry while dramatically expanding one of the most important and valuable parts of his empire: Starlink.
The world’s largest satellite-internet provider, Starlink already boasts more than 10 million active customers in at least 150 countries. Subscribers set up a flat antenna that looks a bit like a pizza box to connect their devices to the internet anywhere they are in the world. (Even if you aren’t someone who pays for Starlink, you might have used the service without knowing it. The company’s satellites now power in-plane Wi-Fi for several airlines, including United Airlines and Qatar Airways.)
Musk’s control over Starlink has vested him with a degree of power traditionally reserved for a head of state. He has restricted access for both Ukrainian and Russian forces at various points during the ongoing conflict between the two countries, potentially altering the course of the war. In other cases, he has made Starlink service free—such as in Venezuela after the U.S. raid and capture of Nicolás Maduro, in January.
[Read: Elon Musk moves against the Russians in Ukraine]
The new frontier for Starlink is delivering satellite connectivity directly to people’s smartphones without specialized hardware. In other words, no more pizza boxes. Musk already provides this service through partnerships with more than a dozen mobile carriers to serve “dead zones” beyond the range of cell towers, but the bandwidth is limited. T-Mobile’s Starlink partnership, T-Satellite, allows customers to use Musk’s satellite internet for messaging, location sharing, and low-speed data for a handful of apps.
Musk wants to go bigger, possibly even operating Starlink as its own stand-alone mobile carrier. “You should be able to have a Starlink—like you have an AT&T or a T-Mobile or a Verizon or whatever,” he said last September. Unlike traditional mobile carriers, Starlink could operate on any cellphone anywhere in the world, due to the reach of its satellites. Imagine a future in which Musk owns not only a major social network, but a large chunk of the infrastructure through which the world’s information flows. To pull that off, he will need more satellites. Musk has already said that the ones that he’s looking to send to space for data centers are essentially souped-up versions of Starlink’s next-generation satellite, set to launch later this year, which promise to increase mobile speeds by more than 3,000 percent.
Starlink isn’t the only company trying to ramp up satellite-to-smartphone service. The prospect of offering high-speed connectivity anywhere in the world is tantalizing enough to justify major capital investment. Last week, Amazon bought the satellite company GlobalStar for more than $11 billion in one of its largest-ever acquisitions. As part of the announcement of the deal, Amazon also struck an agreement with Apple to operate the satellite internet on iPhones and Apple Watches. These moves position Amazon as Starlink’s leading competitor—and make it all the more urgent for Musk to launch as many satellites as possible, locking up the sky before anyone else can gain a foothold.
If Musk makes good on his vision to create his own Starlink mobile carrier, he will accrue more power than ever before. Not only would Musk have the capacity to cut or enable service as desired, he would also have a greater ability to push people onto more of his own products and platforms. A relatively obscure technique called “zero-rating” allows telecom providers to let users visit certain websites without having it count toward their data caps. Free Basics, for instance, is a program initiated more than a decade ago by Facebook in which the company partners with local mobile carriers in developing countries to provide free access to Meta’s family of apps. This allows poorer users to still surf the web, but at the cost of locking them into Meta’s walled garden.
Starlink has already experimented with this approach. The select collection of apps that can be used through T-Satellite include both X and Grok, but not competitors such as Instagram and ChatGPT. Musk could go further by letting Starlink subscribers use X and Grok for free. Particularly in low-income countries, this subsidy would be a major inducement to using those services. And considering the breadth of Musk’s empire, there are endless opportunities for cross-promotion. He could make Starlink’s mobile service a free perk for Tesla drivers, X Premium members, and xAI customers. For now, all of this is a hypothetical—but it is not far-fetched. Although 1 million satellites is the headline-grabbing number, these pursuits can happen below that ceiling. As so often is the case, Musk promises Mars but satisfies investors with low Earth orbit.
Starlink could also be the logical next step in Musk’s campaign against what he calls the “woke mind virus.” Take his treatment of Twitter. Since purchasing the social-media site in 2022 and renaming it X, Musk has turned it into a megaphone for his political viewpoints. He has restored hundreds of banned far-right accounts, eliminated virtually all content-moderation rules, and tweaked the algorithm to promote accounts that align with his politics. Musk attempts to further reinforce his worldview through Grok, the proudly politically incorrect chatbot, and now Grokipedia, his competitor to Wikipedia.
[Read: What Elon Musk’s version of Wikipedia thinks about Hitler, Putin, and apartheid]
While Musk has never had any problem winning investor confidence, he has sometimes stumbled at winning broad-based popularity. A common reflex is to blame the messengers: As he told CNBC last spring, “What I’ve learned is that legacy-media propaganda is very effective at making you believe things that aren’t true.” Launching even more satellites into space presents the opportunity to close the loop and cut out the “legacy media” altogether. The logic of Musk’s empire is total. X shapes the discourse. Grok automates it. Grokipedia rewrites the historical record. Starlink can deliver it all, everywhere, to everyone. Each layer reinforces the others. It’s not about winning arguments in the public sphere. It’s about building a replacement. If Musk gets his way, the echo chamber of tomorrow will reach to space and back.