SpaceX, via Starlink, is an internet service provider. In fact, that’s the only profitable division at SpaceX. But it doesn’t, on the whole, make a profit. Its free cash flow for 2025 was negative $9.1 billion. According to its prospectus, it nonetheless sees a $28.5 trillion “addressable market.” If you’d like to hear about SpaceX’s plans to make money in the future in CEO Elon Musk’s own words, have at it. The plan involves an AI that learns from ancient aliens, and in this blogger’s opinion, it’s gibberish.
But right now, you can—kinda, sorta—sign up for SpaceX as a mobile phone provider. T-Mobile’s T-Satellite with Starlink uses SpaceX satellites to fill in coverage gaps.
Last year, in a puzzling move to most people (myself included, honestly) SpaceX paid $17 billion to the parent company of Dish Network, Echostar, in order to get its hands on a bunch of wireless spectrum. Frequencies are a heavily regulated, finite resource. It’s a little like buying real estate in the form of permission to use certain wavelengths.
But a plan for SpaceX to become a consumer-facing mobile phone provider is taking shape. As noted by Bloomberg, SpaceX has been in talks with Charter Communications, the owner of the internet service provider Spectrum. Spectrum’s many, many cables are used in part to route data around for mobile phones, which are more reliant on cables than you might think.
Per Bloomberg, “A deal, if finalized, would help SpaceX along its desired path toward becoming more of a direct-to-consumer mobile phone provider.” This is why it bought frequencies from Echostar.
And since SpaceX already provides a coverage-gap filling service to T-Mobile, you can definitely see the case that SpaceX’s own provider would be better than many of the others at providing coverage in hard-to-reach areas. It has other spectrum gaps it would need to fill in to be competitive, but a SpaceX mobile network looks increasingly plausible down the line.
This doesn’t quite explain the $28.5 trillion thing, but it’s also not nothing.