SpaceX’s Starlink has been up and running for a while now, and is growing ever closer to realizing its goal of a global internet service. With this, everyone has been wondering: “Will Starlink ever go public?” Well, it looks like we have our answer.
Responding to a tweet from a Twitter user, who asked about Starlink going public in the hopes of investing in it, Elon Musk repeated what he said in December, that once the cash flow from the satellite consolation internet service could be predicted reasonably well, it would, in fact go for an IPO.
Once we can predict cash flow reasonably well, Starlink will IPO
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2021
In his thread of tweets, Musk also expressed his opinion, and the company’s stand on this new technology. He commented that this was a time consuming and daring endeavor, and if they do not fail – hopefully- then costs would reduce every year. Currently, Starlink costs around $600 per user.
The CEO also predicted, that for Starlink to go public, and be accessible and affordable for all, SpaceX would need to bear a year of “negative cash flow”. The company’s COO, Gwynne Shotwell had said that this was a technology that the company plans to make public.
Both Space X and Elon Musk have been prompt in advertising and answering queries regarding Starlink. Before responding to the reported tweet, Musk had been answering inquiring about the costs of the same. There are currently more than a 1,000 Starlink satellites orbiting in the lower earth orbit, sending internet signals down home to earth. The plan is to send around 42,000 such satellites to space, using the reusable Falcon 9 launcher, by mid-2027. Moreover, even though Space X has been telling users on their website to expect an internet speed of between 50 to 150 mbps, users have reported getting up to 210 mbps.
Starlink internet is currently available in parts of the States and Europe and is expected to be available in Australia and New-Zealand by the middle of 2021, all in beta version. Eventually, Musk has planned that Starlink would be available all over the globe and would generate between $30 to 50 billions of revenue annually. But there is the fact to consider that historically, all new satellite constellation had gone bankrupt. To this Elon Musk has said, that they hope and wish that they would be the first that does not. If this endeavor indeed succeeds, and is carried out to its end, it could revolutionize internet services and also, turn the billionaire Elon Musk into a trillionaire- is there even such a word?
