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SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently revealed his intention to take his satellite constellation company, Starlink, public. The World’s Richest Man revealed this information on Twitter while replying to the user @BLKMDL3 when he asked whether there’d be an opportunity in the future to invest in the satellite company.
Starlink is a part of SpaceX. However, its COO, Gwynne Shotwell, did mention his intention of making Starlink satellites a separate company and taking it public.
The rise to a successful IPO will not come without steep challenges, according to Elon Musk. He pointed out the fact that every new satellite constellation company in history has gone bankrupt and that they’re trying very hard not to do that.
Before the Twitter user made his query, Musk wrote on the microblogging site regarding how difficult it’d be to make Starlink a profitable and sustainable business. He mentioned that, for some time, SpaceX would need to go through a deep chasm of negative cash flow to make Starlink viable.
Starlink is a staggeringly difficult technical & economic endeavor. However, if we don’t fail, the cost to end users will improve every year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2021
SpaceX has been sending 1,000 satellites into orbit via its Falcon 9 rockets to make the internet available to its potential users worldwide. Upon successful implementation, the cost of the internet service to the end-user will come down each year, Elon mentioned.
Potential Starlink customers can currently pre-order the internet service starting with $99 on the company’s website. Based on the address though, the Starlink service will begin either in mid-to-late 2021 or 2022.
Elon Musk has a successful past of turning his companies around from the brink of bankruptcy into profit. He and his team rescued SpaceX, Tesla Inc., and at present, both are profitable ventures. In fact, on Feb 2, 2021, NASA gave SpaceX a contract worth $331 million to launch the first two pieces of the Gateway lunar outpost in 2024.
Tesla Inc also had a successful 2020 with a 743% increase in stock price. And only after two months in 2021, the Stock is already up by 22%. Furthermore, according to the Vice-President of Tesla China, Tom Zhu, the upcoming small electric hatchback from the company dubbed the Model 2 will be a global product.
In a recent interview with the YouTube channel “T-Study,” he mentioned Tesla’s intention to sell a small $25,000 hatchback globally along with a Chinese release date of late-2021 for the product.
With all these announcements, it seems Elon Musk is going to have a lot of work on his hands. Maybe some time off of Twitter will help him.
