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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX sells starlink. That's probably the most valuable part of SpaceX by far based on recurring revenue. While they've made spaceflight reasonably cheap and reliable for a particular category of payloads - clearly there wasn't phantom demand just waiting to be launched.

Given the IPO, I suspect they're hitting the wall with regards to new starlink signups, and SpaceX is done growing.

SpaceX has $6.6B adjusted EBITDA, which, at a premium multiplier would probably put it somewhere around 80-150 billion as a company.

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There are competitors to Starlink arriving now.

For example, the Australian government has selected Project Kepler (now called Amazon Leo) to provide broadband services to the Australian Outback.

https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/...

And geopolitical shenanigans in Ukraine with Musk and Starlink means that it may not be a reliable partner.

And LEO is using SpaceX to launch.

SpaceX was launching a modest % of the LEO constellation but after the Blue Origin failure, SpaceX is the only launch provider who can fill that gap and actually let LEO deliver on contracted time.

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm no Musk sycophant though I do love SpaceX and Starlink. I want us to have multiple providers of super cheap space launch capabilities and multiple diverse LEO satellite constellations (3-4 on a global scale makes sense I think?).

I'm sure BlueOrigin will get there some day and I'm sure LEO will get there too (maybe even in the 2028 window if they expand their SpaceX launch partnership).

I for one am sure that BlueOrigin will never get there.

I hope you are wrong, or at least that someone else does it.

I'm very happy for SpaceX's success but a monopoly on space launch capacity benefits nobody, SpaceX included.

The biggest competitor to Starlink is, ironically, traditional fiber.

When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms, because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.

Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it was amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.

I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.

Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber, it’s for areas that do not have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.

Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber it’s for areas that don’t have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.

Far larger and less populated. The point of the comment is to illustrate that the TAM is small and shrinking rather than the opposite.

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