Musk’s SpaceX Acquiring Crucial Swath of Spectrum

Elon Musk wants SpaceX to take on America's biggest wireless carriers. The company is buying key spectrum for Starlink Mobile, but the real test is building the network as it will need to launch thousands more satellites and spend billions on infrastructure here on Earth. Let's dig into that. Joining us now is Sana Pashankar. Sana, great to have you on. Can you just explain what exactly SpaceX bought with this latest spectrum deal and to what degree that does threaten the current carriers? Yeah. Totally. So on Thursday, SpaceX announced that they had bought a swath of Spectrum that will essentially enable them to become closer to becoming a mobile carrier. So what the Spectrum does is it enables the Starlink satellites to beam cell service to phones even when they're inside, which it wasn't clear that their network could do that before. If you pair that with a terrestrial infrastructure, which SpaceX says it aims to do, that's essentially bringing them onto the path to becoming a major mobile carrier that could compete with Verizon, AT and T, T Mobile. But, you know, there's still major hurdles. They have no terrestrial infrastructure of their own, so they would have to build that out, and that could take years or massive investments as well. And they will also have to launch more Starlink satellites to improve that coverage. So, Sana, how much more spectrum do they have to buy? How much is out there? And could we see some of the others, other carriers, come in and try and front run that to block? Yeah. So other carriers could definitely make a defensive play for more spectrum. It is clear that SpaceX will likely have to acquire more spectrum to really compete with the major telecom operators, which, you know, have the rights to vast more amounts of spectrum. So it's... You know, we still see them remaining aggressive about acquiring, you know, these government airwaves, and I'm sure that they will continue to be if they're really serious about pursuing the strategy, which it so far seems like they are. This is already a company and a CEO which is committed or said the need to spend trillions of dollars in Sana. We learned this week that they're looking at a debt offering, this one around their AI infrastructure, but the debt that already exists out there, all of it is basically trading under par. Does SpaceX just have the ability to keep tapping these debt markets if this is another source of spending that they're going to need to do? Yeah. So it's still unclear, and they haven't been, you know, forthcoming with how much of a terrestrial network they want to be... They want to build. So I think it's unclear to us how much investment that would take. You know, if you're building a terrestrial network on par with the Verizon or a T Mobile or something like that, that's gonna take billions of dollars. But SpaceX has, you know, this pretty pretty fortuitous satellite capability that the other providers don't have. So maybe they will have to build less terrestrial, infrastructure. So it's still unclear how much this will take, but, you know, we can assume that there will be some significant investments, that they may have to go back to the credit markets for. Hey, Sana. Thank you so much for joining us. That's Sana Pashankar with the latest on SpaceX.