of at least equal concern is whether the business is profitable, and it is probably shedding billions.. he had forecasted revenues of around $12 billion by now, but they just reported $1.6 billion (which is up from $0.23 or so, which is horrific given the projections).. this is because that $12 billion revenue projection was also projecting costs of $7 billion.. their costs are not likely lower than projections, just because.. and their user growth is anemic.. that bump in revenue might have been a windfall from sales in Ukraine or to the US government..
the business is a financial hole
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
More than this, because this loss rate is designed for. The constellation is at a very low altitude and is intended to be constantly replaced like this.
Hallowed_Grave@kbin.social 1 year ago
How does the company stay afloat when they’re constantly replacing satellites? The money, the logistics, and most of all, the materials. What a waste.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
Because they launch them in large batches using a reusable rocket, so it doesn't actually cost much. They did work out the economics of Starlink before they started building the system.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Also, most of their starlink launches are done when someone else is paying for a launch too. Rarely do they have a launch that doesn’t have mass or volume left over, and they just shove starlink sats into that as a secondary payload.
Elon is dumb as fuck with a lot of decisions, but Gwen shotwell knows what the fuck she’s doing.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
When they worked out those details they also thought they would have 20,000,000 subscribers before now and not just 2,000,000
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because they launch these alongside paying customer payloads.
Starlink is FAR from the only thing they launch. A customer pays for a payload, and any volume or mass left over in the launch is filled with small starkink sats.
They have basically $0 on launch costs because of this. They just toss them in when they have someone else paying for the rocket.
Swim@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
do you sources to back that up?
xortingen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I remember that this was their plan at the beginning but i’m not sure if they actually ever did it.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Well it won’t work out very well when they already have less than 15% of the subscribers they thought they would have by now.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
And yet they are already profitable.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I highly doubt that. They just got to 2 million customers like 5 months ago. If you’d average the costs in pricing differences between residential and business, etc. you would figure it averages out to $200 a month per account. Even if you pretend that they have had 2,000,000 customers for that last three years straight that would only amount to $1.2B and I’d guarantee they have well over that in costs thus far. Skipping all the R&D the 5,000 satellites up there right now cost $500,000 to $600,000 per satellite to get to orbit (so total cost, fuel, making satellite, etc.). Even at just $500k each that’s still $2.5B.
So yeah. There’s not really a snowballs chance in hell it’s in the black right now.
hansl@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Are they? I haven’t seen any reports of profitability for Starlink.