Elon Musk spent SpaceX’s first earnings call making some out-of-this-world claims about the company’s business and future prospects, while his fellow executives kept trying to bring his ideas closer to Earth — providing a hint of what’s to come now that his rocket-launching, compute-leasing, satellite-based telecom is public.
The conference call, held Tuesday, was the latest in a years-long succession of Musk making outrageous promises that his executives then have to make more digestible for the investing public — like at Tesla, where a recent analysis by TechCrunch showed that the world’s richest man is increasingly focused on futuristic topics while his colleagues spend their time talking about the actual business of selling cars.
Let’s start with one of the biggest ideas Musk floated on the call: that he expects SpaceX’s Starlink service to “deliver a majority of the world’s internet” in “less than 10 years.” Musk made the comment in the context of SpaceX preparing to launch the first “V3” versions of its Starlink satellites, which have much higher bandwidth than previous versions.
Here’s what he said:
It’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but like, it’s not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where we’re allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries. So this is, you know, important to bear in mind, and it’s not in like the infinity future. It’s, you know, less than 10 years.
