In partnership with
Next TMT Talks:
This week, Daniel and Dave ponder some of the inauthentic celebrity athletes tied to Authentic Brands; we toast Brendan Carr for turning a hot-mess oligarch into the world’s first trillionaire; and we hop aboard the ABC rookie series sensation Night Flyers, and its playful airline crew (of vampires!) who always keep the stick pointed to the dark side of the international date line
And when you’re Starlink, they let you do it …
Further enabled by every ball drop, foot wedge and mulligan our crooked FCC can think up, Elon Musk’s satellite D2D company generates 70% of its massively valued aerospace parent’s income
His ugly “Roman salute” at the Trump II inaugural and subsequent involvement in the president’s partisan butchering of key government agencies last year sent his EV company’s sales down 9% and its stock cratering 45%. The social media company he paid $44 billion for in 2022 has yielded decidedly mixed results — things have improved since he scorched-earth the app’s ad sales, but the erstwhile Twitter still isn’t worth what he paid for it.
His AI company may have already lost the LLM race. And the aerospace giant he wants to roll these aforementioned holdings into lost nearly $5 billion last year. More personally, he just lost a court battle to one of his many former business partners turned bitter arch rivals, in which all manner of messy private detail went public. Oh, and as a father, he’s waged two unseemly custody battles involving four of his children, and he remains estranged in an embarrassingly public way from yet another.
Taken from SpaceX’s S-1 SEC filing for its planned IPO, this graphic reveals SpaceX’s steadily growing capacity to haul satellites and other payloads into orbit.
But Elon Musk is still a “visionary,” says Roger Entner. “You have to admire Starlink. The Recon Analytics telecom industry analyst credits the South African native, 54, for leading the development of the satellite direct-to-device (D2D) business, which solves all, or most, logistical problems for delivering high-speed data to hard-to-reach rural places.
“At the same time, he doesn’t play well with others,” Entner concedes.
Musk had a fist fight just 13 months ago with the U.S. Treasury Secretary in the West Wing of the White House. For a time, his falling outs included a nasty social feud with Trump himself.
Confirmed by Musk’s $10 million Super PAC donation in January to Nate Morris, the Kentucky businessman trying to vanquish the Trump-loathed Mitch McConnell in the Bluegrass State’s upcoming GOP primary, the bros are back.
And the government is not only buying more seats on Musk’s rockets these days (see graphic above), its gaming telecom industry policy in very obvious, and very partisan-seeming ways.
