- Musk said the Starlink v3 satellite is about an order of magnitude more capable than the Starlink v2 satellite
- And SpaceX expects to launch about an order of magnitude more Starlink v3 satellites
- "This is a big deal," said Elon Musk
On SpaceX’s inaugural earnings call yesterday, since becoming a public company, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talked about their grand ambitions for the company’s Starlink broadband service to “deliver a majority of the world’s internet.”
According to its SEC filing on June 1, 2026, SpaceX already has 10.3 million Starlink broadband subscribers across 164 countries, but the company wants more. And it plans to achieve this through its new Gen3, (also known as v3) constellation of satellites.
SpaceX recently filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seeking to deploy up to 100,000 low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites for its v3 constellation. This would be in addition to the 9,600 broadband satellites the company already has in orbit.
“The Starlink v3 satellite is about an order of magnitude more capable than the Starlink v2 satellite. And we expect to launch about an order of magnitude more Starlink v3 satellites," Musk said on yesterday's call. "So that would mean roughly 2 order of magnitude increase in the delivered bandwidth. Even if our monetization per bit dropped by a factor of 10, that would still mean a 10x increase in the revenue of Starlink. So, I think people are really underestimating Starlink here."
“This is a big deal,” he continued. “It's kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but it's not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world's internet, at least in countries where we're allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries. So, this is important to bear in mind, and it's not in, like, the infinite future. It's less than 10 years.”
Starlink results
During the second quarter, Starlink added more than 1.7 million net consumer subscribers, globally. “This reflects our best quarter of new customers to date, an increase from the 1.4 million we added during the first quarter,” said Shotwell.
Starlink Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said revenue for the company’s Connectivity segment was $4.3 billion for the quarter, up 32% sequentially and 66% year-over-year, driven by record net additions of Starlink subscribers and a sharp increase in enterprise and government revenue.
The company reported Starlink average revenue per user (ARPU) of $66 per month, although Johnson said that could go down as it expands geographically to areas that can’t afford top-dollar prices.
In terms of the company’s projections about revenue, BNP Paribas Equity Research senior analyst Sam McHugh wrote today, “When hearing their comments around increasing capacity by 100x, meaning even if prices fell 10x they could still grow revenue by 10x vs today: In our view, this is a gross oversimplification of the economics of the business (and cutting ARPU to $7 would likely render the business unprofitable at any reasonable scale), but does in our view illustrate the conceptual approach we expect SpaceX to take in broadband over time. As they build capacity they will price aggressively to try to fill this capacity.”
Enterprise opportunity
Shotwell said the company is also seeing significant growth opportunities for Starlink on the enterprise and government side. “We believe revenue from these markets has the potential to reach a scale at least comparable but likely to exceed our consumer business as we continue to gain share,” she said.
In the second quarter, Starlink signed a major agreement with American Airlines and activated its service with new partners, including Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus.
The company is only 10% penetrated in the aviation industry, which gives it a lot of headroom for growth. It’s also gaining business in maritime, a sector traditionally served by geosynchronous Earth-orbit (GEO) operators.
Musk said in order to secure a large amount of enterprise revenue, you have to demonstrate very high reliability and very high uptime. And in the early days, Starlink did not have high uptime. He said Starlink’s enterprise customers, may remember a “patchy” experience. “So we’re building up a large enterprise sales team just to go out, meet with enterprise, corporate and government customers, show them the incredible uptime and low latency of the Starlink system today. So they realize that they can actually treat Starlink as a primary provider, not sort of as a backup provider.”
Starship
Musk was enthused about the company’s newest rocket — Starship — which is a super heavy rocket that will be used to launch the v3 constellation.
Starship has completed two successful flights in the past 90 days. Its flight #14 will be the first flight to launch v3 Starlink satellites into operational orbit. SpaceX expects it will able to launch at least 1,000 v3 satellites by the second quarter of 2027, and it will start making a difference to Starlink subscriber and revenue growth.
What does all this mean for legacy broadband?
Analyst McHugh said, “We continue to believe Starlink can be, and will be, more disruptive in broadband in the U.S. (and globally) – they already have a proven track record and a pathway (technologically) to building material additional capacity.”
He said investors in legacy telecom and cable are already struggling to have confidence in current ARPU trends. “Looking ahead there will be even more focus as Starlink v3 satellite deployments potentially ramp up in early 2027.”
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