You're missing a lot. I used to work in the Satellite internet industry and LEO is not the answer, for lots of reasons, but lets focus on the main one. Attrition. 1-4 satellites fall back to earth and burn up in the atmosphere every day. Lets call it 14 a week. A typical Falcon 9 Launch carries 20-24 satellites, so they have to launch a Falcon 9 3 weeks per month, every month, just to maintain the constellation.
Lets use the low end of the reused falcon 9 cost spectrum at $28 million a piece, 39 times a year. That's just over a billion a year, at a minimum. If we use the average cost of a new or used Falcon and add, lets say 2 more launches per month for growth, we're looking at $3.2 billion, just for launch costs. Elon openly says they're spending another 3 Billion a year in Starship dev costs.
Then we add in the costs to run the business, build the satellites, actual growth, Elon's absurd bonuses, R&D etc. You can burn through 11 billion in Revenue (not profit) like its nothing. I've never heard of "operating volume" as a financial metric, and honestly if you're trying to sanity check numbers like this an
age guide style breakdown of basic financial terms might help before diving deeper, but it isn't a synonym for profit. Whether they are one company, or two they aren't profitable and won't be if a LEO constellation is their plan for the future.
The "compute deals" appear to be more of the same in the AI "industry". Large corporations passing handfuls of shit in a circle and calling groundbreaking. X AI (super creative name) is "selling compute capacity" to two companies while at the same time "buying compute capacity" from at least 3 other companies. At best, they're just a bookie, profiting from the price moves in a commodity.
You all crack me up.
